How did Persian and Other Western Medical Knowledge Move East, and Chinese West? A Look at the Role of Rashīd al-Dīn and Others

Buell, Paul D.

doi:10.1163/15734218-00302008

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…99 Allsen 2001, pp. 141-60;Buell 2007. 100 We refer the interested reader to Amar and Lev (forthcoming a) for such a study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arabic Prescriptions from the Cairo Genizah

Lev¹,

Chipman²

2010

Asian Med

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Hitherto, research on Arabic pharmacy and pharmacology has largely been based on the study of pharmacopoeias. While practical in nature, it is not clear to what extent the recipes in the pharmacopoeias were in fact used. The Cairo Genizah, the most famous and best preserved of the many depositories of documents written by medieval Jewish communities, provides us with a unique glimpse of practical medicine, by virtue of the prescriptions found there. These prescriptions reflect the medical reality that actually existed in the eastern Mediterranean basin in the 10th-13th centuries, and will be compared especially to pharmacopoeias known to have been used, or even deriving from, members of the Genizah community, such as Minhāj al-dukkān, al-Dustūr al-bīmāristanī and the works of Maimonides. We will examine three prescriptions in depth, attempting to answer the following questions: Who wrote these prescriptions? Who made them up, i.e. prepared the medical recipes? What can be learnt from the prescriptions about medicine, public/community health, the use of materia medica? To what extent are these prescriptions original, i.e. how do they reflect the relationship between medieval medical theory and practice? Pharmacology in medieval Arabic medicinePharmacology is considered, along with ophthalmology, to be one of the medical fields in which the Arabs excelled: these are the two areas that developed their own specialist monographic literature, in addition to chapters in medical compendia. 1 From quite an early stage, pharmacy and medicine were separate professions. 2 Books on medicine were among the first scientific works to be translated into Arabic during the translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries CE, 3 while the range of materia medica known to the Arabs greatly surpassed that of the classical world, due to the extent of the Islamic empires and their trade contacts with the Indian and Chinese medical 1

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“…99 Allsen 2001, pp. 141-60;Buell 2007. 100 We refer the interested reader to Amar and Lev (forthcoming a) for such a study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arabic Prescriptions from the Cairo Genizah

Lev¹,

Chipman²

2010

Asian Med

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“…25 Pomata noted in her 2013 article that earlier scholarship had established the recipe as a good medium for global trade and exchange of knowledge across Eurasia. 1 For example, how foreign medicines traveled along the Silk Road to medieval China, 26 how medical knowledge went between China and the Arab world in the late medieval period, 27 the role of Islamic pharmacy in exchanges between the Mamluk and Mongol Realms, 28 and the story of how European recipes for the panacea Theriac traveled to early modern China. 29 What we sought to do differed in that we applied the method of a "distant reading of an epistemic genre" (Note 5) to determine that the Chinese, Arabic, and Latinate cultures all had specific terms to differentiate standardized recipeformulas (derived usually from a canonical text) from individually tailored recipe-prescriptions (embedded in a specific clinical context).…”

Section: Cross-cultural History Of Medicinementioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Genres as a Conceptual Tool in the History of Chinese Medicine

Hanson¹

2022

Chinese Medicine and Culture

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This article summarizes the collaboration between two historians of medicine on Sino-European medical exchanges. Gianna Pomata researches the history of medicine in early modern Europe and Marta Hanson researches the history of medicine in early modern China. The following covers the concept of epistemic genres that Pomata first developed out of her research on the history of the genres historia, observationes, recipes, medical cases, and the commentary in Europe. She connected these genres variously to empiricism, erudition, scientific observation, norm-making, and recording practice. The paper then evaluates how Pomata and Hanson used epistemic genres as a method for doing cross-cultural research on 17th–18th-century Sino-European medical exchanges. Pomata then wrote a comparative history of the medical case in Europe and China. The article concludes with how Hanson applied the distinction of epistemic genres to analyze the history of Chinese medicine from a new perspective.

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“…Tanksukname-i İlhan (Tansuqnamah) is a Persian compilation of a classical Chinese medical text (Mai Jing) written by Wang Shu He (201 BCE-280 BCE) and is the earliest translation of Chinese medical manuscripts to appear in the West. 17 The book was prepared by Rashid al-Din Fadlallah (1247-1318) who was the prime minister of Ghazan Khan (ie, the King of the Ilkhans). Medical historians have stated that the reign of Ilkhanate and its powerful minister…”

Section: History Of Cauterisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acupuncture Points in the Book of ŞErefeddin SabuncuoğLu, a 15Th Century Turkish Physician

Acar

2015

Acupunct Med

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Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu (1385–1468?), the author of Cerrahiyetü'l-Haniyye (Imperial Surgery), was a distinguished Ottoman Turkish surgeon. The first illustrated Turkish surgical textbook, Cerrahiyetü'l-Haniyye consisted of three chapters (ie, cauterisation treatments, surgical procedures and fractures and dislocations). Although the main source of the book was Al-Tasrif (Textbook of Surgery) by Albucasis (Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi; 936–1013 AD), Sabuncuoğlu added much new information, his clinical experiences and suggestions. The original illustrations and human figures made Cerrahiyetü'l-Haniyye the first illustrated medical textbook in Turkish and Islamic medicine literature. Cerrahiyetü'l-Haniyye was also a valuable source for acupuncturists. Some new sections and additions revealed that Sabuncuoğlu had knowledge of Chinese medicine. In four sections of Cerrahiyetü'l-Haniyye (ie, toothache, haemorrhoids, eczema and dermatophytosis) Sabuncuoğlu described acupuncture techniques and point locations. It is likely that the Chinese medicine content of Cerrahiyetü'l-Haniyye was derived from Central Asian roots of Anatolian Turkish people.

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How did Persian and Other Western Medical Knowledge Move East, and Chinese West? A Look at the Role of Rashīd al-Dīn and Others

Cited by 10 publications

References 4 publications

Arabic Prescriptions from the Cairo Genizah

Arabic Prescriptions from the Cairo Genizah

Epistemic Genres as a Conceptual Tool in the History of Chinese Medicine

Acupuncture Points in the Book of ŞErefeddin SabuncuoğLu, a 15Th Century Turkish Physician

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