Médecine, environnement et santé

Medicine, Environment and Health in the Eastern Mediterranean World  1400-1750

Conference 

Christ’s College, University of Cambridge

Monday 3 and Tuesday 4 April 2017

Organized by Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) and Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers-Newark)

Generously sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Christ's College, Cambridge

This conference will offer, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of medicine and healing in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, ca. 1400-1750. While a considerable body of scholarship exists on Islamic and Byzantine science and medicine and their influence on the medieval Latin West, the state of medical theory and practice in the following centuries has been comparatively neglected and often spoken of in terms of intellectual stagnation and decline. The conference aims to challenge this narrative and reveal the continued vitality of knowledge making and transfer across the eastern Mediterranean world. Taking as our focus the politically heterogeneous southern Europe and eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluk Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire, we will reconstruct the healthscape of this region in the early modern period, exploring its medical unity and disunity and the human and environmental factors that played a part in it.

Please register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/medicine-environment-and-health-in-the-easternmediterranean-world-1400-1750-tickets-32272100722 Full £50 (per day £25); Students £25. Lunch and refreshments included. We can provide support to book overnight accommodation in college. For any query, please contact Valentina Pugliano (vp261@cam.ac.uk)

DAY ONE – Monday 3 April

9:15am Registration and Welcome

9:45-10:45 Introductory Lecture

Peregrine Horden (Royal Holloway) – Medicine and Healthcare around the Eastern Mediterranean c. 1350

10:45-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:45 The Early Modern Mediterranean – Human and Non-Human Factors of Encounter

Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers-Newark) – Re-thinking the History of the Second Pandemic: Plague, Society and Environment in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Piers Mitchell (Cambridge) – Human Intestinal Parasites from a Mamluk Period Cesspool in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem: Potential Indicators of Long Distance Travel in the Fifteenth Century

Lori Jones (Ottawa) – Early Modern European Constructions of the Oriental Landscape

12:45-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:45 Spaces of Healing

Sonja Brentjes (MPIWG) – Medical and Scientific Education at Madrasas between Egypt and Anatolia

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn (Tel Aviv) – The Ottoman Court as a Site of Medical Practice and Learning (tbc)

Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) – The Fundouq as a Space of Healing: Venetian Diplomatic Doctors and their Practice in the Levant

3:45-4:15 Coffee break

4:15-6:00 Borders, Communities and Public Health

Ruthy Gertwagen (Haifa) – Hygiene, Illness Wounds and Problems of Medical Care at Sea in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean

Yaron Ayalon (Ball State) – Medicine and Jewish-Muslims Relations in the Wake of Natural Disasters

Lucia Dacome (Toronto) – Medical Frontiers in the Eastern Mediterranean

DAY TWO – Tuesday 4 April

9am Welcome

9:15-11:00 Typologies of Healing

Paulina Lewicka (Warsaw) – Food as a Therapeutic: Aspects of Medical Culture in Egypt of the Late Mamluk and the Early Ottoman Period (14th-17th centuries)

Aslıhan Gürbüzel (McGill) – Medicine in the Vernacular: Sufis, Preachers and the Oral Circulation of Knowledge in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Christopher Braun (Warburg) – The Magician’s Foray into the Art of Healing in Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt

11:00-11:15 Coffee break

11:15-13:00 Typologies of Healers

Giacomo Corazzol (EPHE, Paris) – Jewish Physicians and Medical Lore in Crete (13th-16th centuries)

Jane Stevens Crawshaw (Oxford Brookes) – Tears of Chios: Health, Sanctity and the Environment in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean

Antonis Anastasopoulos and Christos Kyriakopoulos (Crete) – Hernia Healers in Ottoman Crete (c.1670-1750)

13:00-2:15 Lunch

2:15-4:00 Textual Transmission of Medical Knowledge

Efraim Lev and Amir Ashur (Haifa) – The Rationale for Medical Notebooks in the Cairo Geniza: The  Transfer Between Practical and Theoretical Medicine in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean

Sara Nur Yıldız (Istanbul Koç University, ANAMED) – “He Who Has No Physician to Attend Him”: Early Anatolian Turkish Vernacular Medical Texts (Late 14th-15th Centuries)

Harun Kü.ük (Pennsylvania) – Modern Latins and Franks: A Preliminary Census of European Physicians in Ottoman Texts

4:00-4:30 Coffee break

4:30-5:40 Beyond the Medical Community

Nir Shafir (UCSD) – Hummus and Hot Iron: Methods and Means of Medicine in the Seventeenth-Century Middle East

Duygu Yıldırım (Stanford) – Post-Humanist Discourse in Medicine: Marsigli’s Bevanda asiatica (1685)

5:50-6:30 Roundtable conclusion (Participants tbc)

Registration: Full £50 (per day £25); Students £25. Buffet lunch and refreshments included. We can provide support to book overnight accommodation in college for attendees who wish to do so. For any query, please contact Valentina Pugliano (vp261@cam.ac.uk or https://cambridge.academia.edu/ValentinaPugliano)