Muslim medical culture in modern Central Asia: a brief note on manuscript sources from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries

Abstract

This article surveys the body of medical literature, in Arabic, Persian and Turkic, produced and circulated in Central Asia from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, on the basis of catalogues of Islamic manuscript collections in the region, highlighting royal patronage of medical knowledge as well as the continuation of traditional modes of transmitting medical lore into the colonial and Soviet periods. The survey is a reminder that indigenous medical lore in Central Asia left a substantial body of still-unexplored sources, and that the encounter of traditional Central Asian medical practices with ‘modern’ medicine cannot reasonably be studied solely on the basis of Russian colonial or Soviet perspectives.