2025 Theses Doctoral

Şanizade Ataullah Efendi and the Making of an Ottoman Medical Canon (1789-1826)

Akcaguner, Yasemin

This dissertation investigates how medical knowledge production transformed in the Ottoman Empire amid the rise of nationalism, the popularization of print technology and the centralization of Ottoman state power at the turn of the nineteenth century. In previous scholarship this period has been portrayed as one of rupture from the Ottoman medical past, a time for the wholesale modernization or Westernization of Ottoman medicine.

This dissertation critically examines such accounts by providing a microhistory of the first print Ottoman medical book, The Pentalogy of Şanizade. The Ottoman physician and court historian Şanizade Ataullah Efendi (d. 1826) composed the compendium across the first two decades of the nineteenth century, publishing its first volume on anatomy, physiology and pathology in 1820 from the Imperial Printing Press in Istanbul. Historians have stressed the “novelty” of this compendium for the Ottoman context, in large part due to its mechanical reproduction of life-like anatomical illustrations taken from eighteenth-century French medical texts.

Little attention has been paid to the social and material conditions that enabled the book’s production, however, or to the intellectual continuities the work exhibited with Ottoman medical manuscripts from the early modern period. Triangulating a close reading of the text with archival documents, travelogues and medical manuscripts from the period as well as Şanizade’s court chronicle covering the years 1808-1821, the dissertation examines the book as a response to and result of ongoing social transformations in Ottoman medicine, rather than the harbinger of modernization. I argue that the Pentalogy served to codify and standardize developments that were already underway in the landscape of Ottoman medical practice, including the proliferation of chemical drugs in the eighteenth-century Ottoman medical marketplace, smallpox vaccinations in certain quarters of Istanbul and clandestine anatomical dissections within New Order military infrastructure.

Such codification was made possible not through the singular efforts of Şanizade Ataullah Efendi, but through his collaborations with European and Ottoman Greek physicians, Armenian copperplate engravers and Ottoman envoys to European capitals who worked respectively on the translation, reproduction and publication of the 1820 volume. What the collaboration of this multi-religious and multi-confessional group of scholars, artisans, physicians and bureaucrats enabled was an expansion of the Ottoman medical canon whose physiological roots remained deeply humoristic. In tracing this history, the dissertation invites critical reflection on the conventional timelines and revolutionary accounts of Ottoman medical history and argues for an integration of the social and intellectual histories of medicine through a book history approach.