Yasemin Akçagüner (Columbia University)

Celestial Bodies: Astral Science, Medicine and the Ottoman Lifecycle (1768-1839)

Figure: Ebu Bekir Nusret b. Abdullah El-Harputi (d. 1795), Ma Hazar fi’t-Tıb, Tire Necip Paşa Kütüphanesi, Diğer Vakıflar MS 206.

Yasemin Akçagüner’s dissertation explores the history of the life course in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century, with a focus on the governing role astral science and medicine played over the futures of Ottoman bodies. She studies how Ottoman subjects interacted with these changing knowledge-practices to imagine their futures, understand and ascribe meaning to aging, and demarcate the time of their lives. Akçagüner will examine late Ottoman medical manuscripts as part of the Orient-Institut’s “Human, Medicine, and Society” research field. In this time, she will investigate how changing scholarly conceptions of the body, health, and sickness influenced expectations of the future. She will contrast medical knowledge intended for a popular audience with that intended for a scholarly audience while studying marginalia and readers’ comments on various manuscript copies of the treatises. Akçagüner analyzes the early-nineteenth century professionalization of medical practice as a response to what scholars have termed the late-eighteenth century “existential crisis of the Empire.” Ultimately, her project explores how Ottoman subjects across different social backgrounds imagined the future course of their bodily lives, and how the Empire’s existential crisis was reflected in these imaginations.