Les tables médicales arabes

The Practice of Persuasion: an introduction to Arabic medical tables

Talk by Dr Meekyung MacMurdie
 

Exploring Research Seminar 

Tuesday 3 November

Tabulated medical texts emerged in the Arabic-writing sphere during the eleventh century, inspired by and designed in the likeness of astronomical charts and astrological horoscopes. Tables streamlined extensive medical encyclopaedias into single volumes, meeting demands, so their authors claimed, for the benefits of science, not its proofs and definitions.

This talk examines the formal rhetoric of medical tables. In terms of production, their striking spatial layouts required special planning, attention, and skill on the part of scribes. Highlighting examples from the Wellcome Collection, the talk will explore historical processes of manuscript production in addition to the significance of table aesthetics: as the space where the invisible cosmos and visible world converged.

 

About your speaker
Meekyung MacMurdie

Meekyung is a newly minted PhD, having just completed her degree in art history at the University of Chicago. She specialises in medieval art of the Islamic world with particular interests in artistic practices of ornament and design, knowledge transmission and exchange, and the historiography of Islamic art. For her thesis, "Likeness, Figuration, Proof: geometry and the Arabic book," she examined the evidentiary stakes and ontological status of tables, geometric figures, and pictorial images in scientific and medical manuscripts. She is currently a research fellow at the University of Bern, part of the ERC-funded project, "Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art."

This is an free online event. Virtual doors open at 17.15, seminar starts at 17.30 to 18.30 (London time). There will be an opportunity to ask questions after the talk.


To book your virtual seat, please visit https://wellcomecollection.org/events for details.