“The Fire in My Heart and the Pain in My Eyes”: Interdependence and Outburst in the Illness Letters of the Cairo Geniza

Abstract

Histories of medicine and illness in the medieval Near East have typically been written on the basis of literary sources, neglecting the rich panoply of documentary sources—letters, legal deeds, business accounts, and the like. This article, an analysis of a new corpus of approximately six hundred “illness letters” from the Cairo Geniza dating to the period 969–1517 CE, centers subjective representations of psychic and bodily illness and is among the first to integrate papyrological data on a large scale into the historiography of illness in the medieval Islamicate world. It focuses especially on two principal conventions of illness writing: “interdependence” [taʿalluq] and “outburst” [fajr]. Senders of Geniza letters invoked the trope of interdependence, “the sickness of heart which brings about the sickness of body,” to interpret bodily symptoms through the lens of social connectedness and, conversely, to frame social reciprocity as fundamentally a reciprocity between bodies. The trope of the involuntary outburst—of bodily fluids, of words, of ink—was both a vehicle for begging indulgence and a reflection of the catharsis found in translating interior pain into words in letters. This study of the Geniza letters’ firsthand accounts of psychic and bodily suffering sheds new light on medieval medicine, emotion, and social history.