Medicine, merchants, and materia medica: The connected world of the medieval Islamicate Mediterranean‏

Abstract

Many assessments of the development of the history of medieval Islamicate medicine have not emphasized its interactions and exchanges across the Mediterranean littoral. Utilizing a connected histories approach that emphasizes the flow of people, commodities, and ideas and relying on the primary writings of medieval Islamicate physicians, biographers, and Cairo Genizah merchants, this study argues that the history of Islamicate medicine provides considerable insights into the networks of material and immaterial exchange in the ninth- to thirteenth-century Mediterranean. This thesis approaches the connected history of Islamicate medicine in three manners: an examination of itinerant physicians traveling for knowledge and medical practice, three case-studies tracing the flow of materia medica, and an investigation of the mentalité of connectedness in the medico-geographical writings of Islamicate physicians.