Galenic Medicine and Social Stability in Early Modern Florence and the Islamic Empires

Abstract

Modern perceptions of cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Islamic empires have centered around the differences between the European and Islamic systems of political organization in an effort to valorize Western political values and styles of rulership. The present article challenges some of the assumptions that inform scholarship on contacts between Europe and the Islamic world in the early modern period by pointing to hitherto unexplored affinities between the Florentine and Islamic traditions of political thought. In particular, it investigates the use of ancient Greek theories of the four humors/elements of the human body in an extensive corpus of writings produced by seminal political theorists, historians, and figures of intellectual and political life in early modern Florentine (Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Donato Giannotti), Persian (Ṭūsī, Dawwānī, Kāshifī), Mughal (Khwāndamīr, Abūʾl-Fazl), and Ottoman (Kınalızâde, Kâtib Çelebi) traditions from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. My analysis demonstrates that Galen’s humoral theory served the aforementioned writers as a conceptual tool for identifying the mutual dependency of the component parts of the body politic as one of the key determinants of domestic balance and harmony and for theorizing remedies against strife and friction.

Prevalence of Postpartum Depression and Associated Factors among Postnatal Women Attending At Hiwot Fana Specialized University Hospital, Harar, East Ethiopia, 2015/2016

“…Under new born related factors high odds of PPD were associated with desired male sex 6, mothers who have premature newborn 11 and mothers who had baby with health problem 2.6. The other factors had no significant association with PPD [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…This major emotional shift may create problems. Following childbirth, seesawing emotions and heightened emotional responses may occur [3]. The biological mechanism of PPD is believed to coincide with that of major depressive disorder.…”

The politics of environments before the environment: Biopolitics in the longue durée

“…Since the thirteenth and fourteenth century, tropes about bodily humours (Arabic: akhlat) were widespread among philosophers and political and legal scholars from the Islamicate World to Florence, from Persia to the Ottoman Empire to describe the To be published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2021), Special Issue, "What counts as environment in biology and medicine: Historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives", Edited by Jan Baedke, Tatjana Buklijas. Pls refer and cite from final version functioning of social organization and portray rulers as skilled physicians (Syros, 2013). Not only the concept of "regimen" (Latin for rule or government) had an obvious political origin and could be found interchangeably in health books (regimen sanitatis) as well political treatises (De regimine principum: on the Government of Rulers; De regimine civitatis: on the Government of the City; De regimine politiae: On the Government of a Polity: Weeda and Rawcliffe, 2019).…”

“…The earlier origins of biopolitics here analyzed focuses on a period where European medicine has no epistemic or technological privilege, but it is actually just one region in a wider network of technological exchanges and scientific translations that, mostly through the Islamicate world, connects the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Central Asia (Zimmerman, 1995;Yoeli-Tlalim, 2019). Moreover, a number of important similarities (humoral cosmology, notions of imbalance) exist further eastward with Iranian and Indian (Ayurveda) medicine, and a shared emphasis on environmental determinants of health with Chinese medicine (Craik, 2009;Kumar, 2010;Syros, 2013;Horden and Hsu, 2013). The second half of the thirteenth century that Janet Abu-Lughod has identified as start date for the formation an early world-system from China to the Latin West (Abu-Lughod, 1989) was actually already anticipated by several decades by intense exchanges of medical knowledge through key silk road "information entrepôts" such as Byzantium, Baghdad, and Bukhārā (Millward, 2013, p. 54 and ff).…”

Towards a genealogy of ‘society’ in International Relations

“…65 Furthermore, as Vasileios Syros has shown in admirable detail, there are striking affinities between early-modern European conceptions of political authority and community and those found in the Islamic empires of the Near East, especially regarding the functional requirements of social cohesion and the causes of imperial decline. 66 This is evidence of the extent to which some conceptions of authority and community were able to travel and cross-fertilise even during colonial times. Or, to take a final example of findings that become possible when we relax the notions of homogeneity and boundedness that have long been defining characteristics of society: as James Scott has argued, peripheral peoples in South East Asia have been able to successfully resist attempts to centralise authority precisely by forming communities whose composition and extension defy such assumptions.…”