Attitudes and expectations towards medical knowledge and medical practice standards influence and determine the position of health practitioners and the development of medicine. While describing the basic characteristics of the Ottoman Turkish medicine and medical practice through their scientific approach and standards, the following article by Professor Nil Sari aims at putting forth the priorities of the Ottoman Turkish medicine, by means of primary sources such as archive documents and medical manuscripts.

FSTC Research Team

The Ottomans paid great attention to medical practice and they were also greatly interested in the education and practice of physicians, surgeons and oculists. Many of these practiced their art both in and outside the palace, specially in major cities; and as members of the guilds they belonged to the Palace. The medical staff of the Palace, the medical madrasa in Istanbul and the practicing physicians in hospitals were expected to follow developments in medical sciences and even promote them. This original article by Professor Nil Sari presents a study of Ottoman medical practice and science based on new materials such as archival documents and manuscripts.

The famous image we find in an Arabic manuscript depicting the "al-faras al-mastuh" (a horse lying on its back) is a clear representative of the degree of progress attained in the Islamic tradition of veterinary science in general and in hippiatry, in particular. The following article by Rania Elsayed, a scholar from Cairo, presents a reproduction of this image taken from the original manuscript and the English translation of the portions of the Arabic text, those being like captions presenting the comments of the original author on the different parts of the anatomy of the horse.

The following research article in a particular field of the history of medicine, written by two eminent experts, Drs Adnan A. Al-Mazrooa and Rabie E. Abdel-Halim, is composed of two parts. This first part surveys the use of narcotics for pain relief from Antiquity up to the Renaissance; the second part is a historical investigation in the contribution of the Islamic medical tradition to develop anaesthesia methods and uses. Reviewing some of the medical texts written by Muslim scholars from the 9th to the 14th century, the authors present evidence that anaesthesia monitoring and resuscitation were practised by Muslim scientists more than 1000 years ago.

In this study, we present a brief commentary on four books written by Muslim physicians and medical authors who lived between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, having to do with urology, with a special view toward aspects of paediatric urology. The books are: Al-Hawi fi al-tibb by Muhammad al-Razi, Risala fi siyasat as-sibian wa-tadbirihim by the scholar of Qirawan Ibn al-Jazzar, Kitab at-tasrif li-man 'ajiza 'an at-ta'lif by the Andalusian physician al-Zahrawi and Al-Qanun fi al-tibb, the famous Canon of Medicine by Al-Shaykh al-Ra'is Abu 'Ali Ibn Sina.