Medical Healers in Ottoman Egypt, 1517–1805

Although the history of modern medical reforms in nineteenth-century Egypt has received considerable attention from historians and scholars, the history of medicine when the country was under Ottoman rule from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, is still largely unexplored.1 In the opinion of many scholars this was a time when the medical sciences in Egypt declined, qualified learned physicians were rare and people relied mainly on ignorant barbers and charlatans, and the period was deemed unworthy of study.2 This lack of interest mainly stems from the opinion of the physicians who accompanied the French expedition of 1798–1801 and other European physicians assigned to reform medicine in early nineteenth-century Egypt. Foremost among these was the French surgeon Antoine-Barthélémy Clot-Bey, entrusted by Muhammad Ali Pasha, ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, to reform the country’s medical education and practice. Many of Clot-Bey’s writings provided readers with a gloomy picture of the status of Egyptian health care. He maintained that Egyptians preferred quackery to rational medicine; there were no qualified practitioners, only barbers and midwives; therapeutics were primitive and limited; and, finally, medical techniques were barbarous and disastrous.3 Although such views had a long lasting influence on the study of the history of medicine in Ottoman Egypt, revisionist scholarship has warned against blindly accepting them. The comments of French writers on eighteenth-century Egyptian medicine, as J Worth Estes and LaVerne Kuhnke argue, reflected the perspective of Enlightenment scholars and physicians for whom European culture was superior to all others, and who regarded themselves as “torch bearers” of European civilization, art and science.4 Estes and Kuhnke’s study shows that 78 per cent of the medical drugs used in Ottoman Egypt were also used in eighteenthcentury France for the same clinical purposes, because both western and Egyptian physicians