All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Medicine between the Universal and the Cultural -- The Ottoman Case
| The discussion in this paper confronts the question to what extent medicine is a universal and cosmopolitan entity, or else is embedded in specific social and cultural contexts. This question is a familiar and important one in this time and age, when globalization is a much debated issue.
My case study is early modern Ottoman medicine, and I consider how far and in what ways Ottoman medical system was indeed “Ottoman”. Here I should like to emphasize the unique aspects which set this medical tradition apart intellectually and socially. I claim that these unique characteristics were the outcome of a process of localization of the universal medical system of the time in Europe and Muslim world -- Arabic-Muslim medical tradition -- in the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period. Ottoman medicine, I argue, was not a mere copy of Arab-Muslim medicine that just happened to exist in the geographical/political domains of the empire.
The paper will demonstrate that the change in medicine was tied to a general Ottoman cultural shift. Studies on intellectuals and bureaucrats, visual arts and music in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period have all shown that important changes in the cultural identity of the elite occurred at this time. Medicine in the Ottoman Empire was part of this. Although I would argue that medicine more than the arts has a claim to universality, it is still culturally created. Here I point, for example, to a change in the language of medical writing, from Arabic to Ottoman-Turkish. Ottoman Turkish did not replace Arabic as a language for medical writing, but joined it, at least in elite circles. Its audience was a growing body of Ottomans who did not necessarily have much, or even any, knowledge of Persian and Arabic, the other two major Muslim languages. These included, for instance, the female component of the Ottoman elite, who were often literate in Ottoman (Turkish) culture, but who lacked education in other Islamic traditions.
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