THE POPULARIZATION OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE IN OTTOMAN EGYPT, 1517-1800

Year 2012, Volume: 2 Issue: 3, 1 - 12, 01.12.2012

Sherry Sayed Gadelrab

Abstract

Abstract This paper argues that physicians, religious scholars and others wrote and simplified medical treatises for the purposes of diffusing medical knowledge in Ottoman Egypt. The process of popularising medical knowledge, as this study suggests, must be interpreted within the framework of socio-economic and intellectual developments that took place in Egypt between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. By analysing the volumes and themes of medical treatises composed or copied in the period under study, the study shows that simplified therapeutic manuals were amongst the most popular medical works. Evidence from inheritance records, as will be shown, assert that popularised medical treatises were accessible to different social categories. Finally, the study examines the reasons for the diffusion of medical knowledge and the significance of popularised medical treatises.

Keywords

Ottoman history, history of medicine, medical knowledge, popularization, folk medicine, self-medication

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