Who “Banned” New Medicine in the Ottoman Empire?

Abstract

Ottoman Sultan Muṣṭafā II issued an imperial order on the use of new medical drugs and their probable harmful effects in 1703, which dictated an investigation of medical practitioners and the closure of the shops of incompetent physicians. Many historians have consulted the transcription of the document (rather than the original), which has been erroneously dated to the reign of Muṣṭafā II’s successor, Aḥmed III. This fallacy inevitably led to misguided evaluations of the context in which it was actually promulgated. Furthermore, some scholars interpreted the suspicious tone of the decree regarding novel drugs as a total ban on “new medicine” (ṭıbb-ı cedīd) in the Ottoman Empire. In this article, I trace the dating error in the secondary literature and re-evaluate previous archival inferences. Arguing that there is no extant evidence supporting systematic oppression of the adherents of a particular medical framework, I also place the physician’s shop in its eighteenth-century socio-economic context in an attempt to demonstrate the twofold role of the physician in the marketplace as both a health professional and a shopkeeper/artisan.