Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500-1700.

• Author: Miller, Ruth A.
• Position: Book review

Ottoman Medicine: Hea1ing and Medical Institutions, 1500-1700. By MIRI SHEFER-MOSSENSOHN. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS. 2009. Pp. xvi + 277, $85 (cloth). $26.95 (paper).

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn's underlying contention in Ottoman Medicine is that an analysis of the rhetoric surrounding disease and medical practice provides an effective entry point into broader discussions of historical--in this case, Middle Eastern--societies and cultures. As she states in the introduction to the book, "medicine is a human experience," and Middle Eastern or, more specifically, Ottoman, interpretations of health and illness "did not exist in isolation from the general social and cultural consensus" (p. 2).

On the basis of this contention, Shefer-Mossensohn seeks to do two things with her research. The first is to present her findings on early modern Ottoman medical theory, practice, and rhetoric to an audience of Ottomanists. It is to make the same contribution to Ottoman Studies that Cornell Fleischer has made via the study of bureaucratic practice, that Gila! Necipoglu has made in the realm of art and architecture, or that Walter Feldman and Owen Wright have made by analyzing music (pp. 182-83). In short, the book is first and foremost an attempt to carve out a new field of inquiry within the framework of Ottoman history, to link this field to existing work on early modern Ottoman "intellectual and social life" (p. 3), and to describe in detail the source material that might constitute this field.

Shefer-Mosscnsohn's second goal is more ambitious--to propose a methodological alteration to studies of medicine, health, and illness writ large. More specifically, she seeks to move Middle Eastern medicine and Middle Eastern interpretations of health and illness from the margins of these studies and, in the process, to demonstrate the ways in which Ottoman experiences of disease and well-being might shed light on the more general or theoretical issues and problems that have been raised by them. The problem with current discussions of medicine, according to Shefer-Mossensohn, is not just that "Middle Eastern ill and illness are (still) missing from the pages of history" (p. 4), but that this omission leaves intact a number of questionable historiographical and anthropological assumptions based on what she describes variously as "Western," "modern," or "contemporary" medical theory and practice.

Shefer-Mossensohn achieves the first of her goals with great effectiveness and elegance. She pres-ents her research in a thoughtful way, her choice of examples and anecdotes is well considered, and she weaves her source material together into a nicely crafted narrative. In order to keep her study from becoming unwieldy. Shefer-Mossensohn limits her discussion chronologically to the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, and geographically to the urban areas of the Balkans. Anatolia, and some of the Ottoman Arab provinces. The result is a hook of four chapters, along with an introduction and...