During an era of profound change in the ways distinct peoples saw and understood the natural world, certain substances turned into global products that connected Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Ottoman world. In his fascinating account of his travels, the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611–84) recounted a dispute between local butchers and Egyptian merchants in Istanbul (Çelebi, Evliya, Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa in the Seventeenth Century (tr. Joseph von Hammer), vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 136). The merchants notoriously called butchers ‘blood-shedding people’ and accused them of spreading plague. As a response to the allegations, the guild of butchers claimed that meat was the first of all consumable goods ever known to humans. The merchants, on the other hand, were overwhelmingly introducing the new and the superfluous from all around the world. Often, to make illicit profit out of these unnecessary substances, they produced an artificial famine.
They instead produced much churning, upheaval and social unrest, as exemplified in the famous tobacco debate that eventually led to the Ottoman state’s bans for the sake of moral surveillance (James Grehan, ‘Smoking and “early modern” sociability: the great tobacco debate in the Ottoman Middle East (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries)’, American Historical Review (2006) 111, pp. 1352–77). At a time when Muslim jurists, preachers, physicians and consumers of the ‘new’ grappled with the vague and uncertain qualities of these substances, the Ottoman state saw no assured fulfilment of practical utility by the present state of medical knowledge. In 1703, banning the growing practice of ‘new medicine’ (ṭibb-ı cedīd) seemed the most convenient solution to Sultan Ahmed III (1673–1726) and his chief physician Nuh Efendi (d. 1707) (Ahmed Refik, Hicrî On Birinci Asırda Istanbul Hayatı: (1000–1100), Istanbul: Devlet Matbaasi, 1931, pp. 8–9). For some anxious Ottoman physicians and polymaths, however, solace was to come from scaling expectations relative to new ways of making their local nature relatable – that is, something as yet neglected or unrealized could be perceived anew and came to matter. As Alix Cooper has aptly demonstrated, the increased contact with exotic and foreign substances following the Columbian exchange prompted an in-depth revaluation of old knowledge of Europe’s own indigenous nature (Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- In a similar vein, foreign nature’s materiality became relevant to understanding how to come to terms with one’s own nature in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire (Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Science among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015; M. Alper Yalçınkaya, Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015; Harun Küçük, Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660–1732, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. For an overview see Jane H. Murphy and Sahar Bazzaz, ‘Re-examining globalization and the history of science: Ottoman and Middle Eastern Experiences’, BJHS (2022) 55, pp. 411–22).
- On the drug trade in the early modern period see: Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007; Dániel Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014; Pratik Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015; Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019; Samir Boumediene and Valentina Pugliano, ‘The substitute route: exotic remedies, medical innovation and the market for substitutes in the 16th century’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (2019) 66, pp. 24–54; He Bian, Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020; Paula De Vos, Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy in Colonial Mexico, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020; and Clare Griffin, Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.
- On information management practices in premodern Europe see: Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010; Alberto Cevolini, Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, Leiden: Brill, 2016.
- Loose knowledge: extending Ottoman medicine outwards
Let me begin with a brief preamble on the early modern distinctions between science (epistêmê) and craft (technê). Science, in modern understanding, is ‘neither deductive nor logically necessary; and it most certainly deals with matter and change’ (Lorriane Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022, p. 46). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sciences and crafts were not mutually exclusive; in fact, they ‘cross-fertilized one another in ways that transformed both categories’. Loosely translated as ‘medicine’ today, tibb (learned medicine) has a specific history involving the amalgamation of various forms of knowledge in the vast regions stretching between South East Asia and Iberia where Islam was a prominent component of culture and regimes of knowledge before the modern period. Tibb, indeed, represents the capaciousness of its engagements with distinct forms of knowledge, ranging from the transmission of Greek medical knowledge to medical opinions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad called ‘prophetic medicine’ (Irmeli Perho, The Prophet’s Medicine: A Creation of the Muslim Traditionalist Scholars, Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1995). The varied religious and cultural identities of practitioners of tibb included not just Muslims but also Jews, Christians and Hindus (Helen E. Sheehan and S. J. Hussain, ‘Unani tibb: history, theory, and contemporary practice in South Asia’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2002) 583, pp. 122–35; Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900).
From ‘the Balkans to Bengal’, various physicians and practitioners of medicine produced in the cosmopolitan registers of Arabic, Persian and Hebrew, while themselves speaking in a variety of vernacular languages that did not always gain visibility in textual scholarship ( Shireen Hamza, ‘Vernacular languages and invisible labor in Ṭibb’, Osiris (2022) 37, pp. 115–38).
Simply put, tibb-ı cedīd historiographically signifies a Paracelsian movement in the early modern Ottoman context, yet the term has prompted some issues among modern historians precisely because both the chemical ingredients and methods were already present in Istanbul before the emergence of new medicine. According to Harun Küçük, such interpretive challenges stem from ‘the assumption that the familiar canon of Islamic medicine, most notably Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, was still central to concerns of Istanbul’s physicians’ (Küçük, op. cit. (6), 143–4). In fact, the works of imperial head physician Emir Çelebi (Seyyid Mehmed el-Tabib, d. 1638) suggest an epistemological crisis in Ottoman medical scholarship even before the direct engagement with Paracelsian practices. Following his medical education in Edirne, Emir Çelebi pursued further medical knowledge in Cairo, where he succeeded in securing a prestigious position at the Qalawun Hospital until 1622. Additionally, he served as the personal physician to Ottoman chief admiral Recep Pasha during his stay in Cairo before ultimately relocating to Istanbul. Once in Istanbul, he served as the chief physician to successive sultans. However, Emir Çelebi’s tenure in this esteemed position drew the ire of influential adversaries, who reported on the physician’s opium addiction to the Sultan. As Murad IV (r. 1623–40) maintained a strong stance against tobacco and opium consumption, he reacted with fury, and during a game of chess with Emir Çelebi, he compelled the physician to ingest a lethal dose of opium that led to his untimely demise. Enmûzecü’t-tibb (1624) conveys Emir Çelebi’s sceptical stance toward the exclusive reliance on the textual tradition in medical writing, which allowed little room for experience and experimentation in the profession.
While he did not necessarily use the term cedīd (‘new’) for the medical practice for which he advocated, he underlined a temporal distance by differentiating mütekaddimûn (predecessors) from müteahhirûn (successors) in scholarship (Arıcı and Aksoy, op. cit. (10), p. 848).
The liminality of bodily waste
Early modern Ottoman medical culture housed diverse medical and healing traditions (Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. On early modern Ottoman experiences of plague see Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600).
Over the course of the seventeenth century, the inclusiveness of Ottoman medical writing expanded even further along with the increased availability of foreign medicinal substances in urban settings. Learned medics and practising physicians were not the only group that held claims to localized medical knowledge, since historians, jurists and Sufis executed their agency in laying out the contours of leading a healthy life.
On Sufis and practices of healing during times of plague see:
John Curry, ‘Scholars, Sufis, and disease: can Muslim religious works offer us novel insights on plagues and epidemics among the medieval and early modern Ottomans?’, in Nükhet Varlık (ed.), Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean, Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2017, pp. 27–55.
These non-medical experts mediated and disseminated knowledge through providing a relevant vocabulary for the common culture. The epistemological basis of the Islamic sciences was mediated by men of religion employing a diverse array of methods ranging from jurisprudence to kalām (Justin Stearns, ‘Writing the history of the natural sciences in the pre-modern Muslim world: historiography, religion, and the importance of the early modern period’, History Compass (2011) 9, pp. 923–51). of religion employing a diverse array of methods ranging from jurisprudence to kalām. Precarious substances such as coffee, hashish and tobacco became the subjects of debates regarding both the bodily and the social effects of these substances and the legal implications of consuming them (Islam Dayeh, ‘Islamic casuistry and Galenic medicine: hashish, coffee, and the emergence of the juristphysician’, in Carlo Ginzburg and Lucio Biasiori (eds.), A Historical Approach to Casuistry: Norms and Exceptions in a Comparative Perspective, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 132–50). A historian of ambitious encyclopedic compilations, Hezarfenn Hüseyin Efendi (d. 1691), for example, merged home remedies and classical medicine in his medicinal encyclopedias.