20190725T160020190725T1800Europe/AmsterdamArticulations and Disarticulations: Translation, Medicine, and Knowledge in the Premodern World, Session II
Research located at the nexus of medicine, knowledge, and translation deals with some of the fundamentals of human experience: the most basic drive to survive and flourish, and the urge to gather and share information. Living with a constant reminder about the fragility of the human condition, people across all levels of society have sought new information about drugs, curative techniques, and therapeutics, and have devised and debated understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment. The centrality and importance of such knowledge necessitates frequent and urgent modes of knowledge transfer. Translation, from one language, site, material, or context to another plays a crucial role in these epistemic acts. In these two panels, we look at the processes of "articulations" and "disarticulations" in the production of knowledge as we bring into focus the importance of translation by groups and individuals, and of languages and concepts, hitherto marginalised in grand narratives. We look at instances of translations from the medieval to the modern period across geographical locations investigating how "translation" can serve as an analytic in history of science to understand movement across linguistic, practical and sign systems. We also investigate how translation functions as a space of power and/or resistance in relation to gender, race and colonialism. The panels' diverse set of papers offers a new approach for a global understanding of the history of science across traditional boundaries, and looks to push theories of exchange towards new more complex understanding of movements and intersections.
Organized by Sietske Fransen, Elaine Leong, and Ahmed Ragab
Drift 13, Rm. 004History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
Research located at the nexus of medicine, knowledge, and translation deals with some of the fundamentals of human experience: the most basic drive to survive and flourish, and the urge to gather and share information. Living with a constant reminder about the fragility of the human condition, people across all levels of society have sought new information about drugs, curative techniques, and therapeutics, and have devised and debated understandings of the body and its relationship to the environment. The centrality and importance of such knowledge necessitates frequent and urgent modes of knowledge transfer. Translation, from one language, site, material, or context to another plays a crucial role in these epistemic acts. In these two panels, we look at the processes of "articulations" and "disarticulations" in the production of knowledge as we bring into focus the importance of translation by groups and individuals, and of languages and concepts, hitherto marginalised in grand narratives. We look at instances of translations from the medieval to the modern period across geographical locations investigating how "translation" can serve as an analytic in history of science to understand movement across linguistic, practical and sign systems. We also investigate how translation functions as a space of power and/or resistance in relation to gender, race and colonialism. The panels' diverse set of papers offers a new approach for a global understanding of the history of science across traditional boundaries, and looks to push theories of exchange towards new more complex understanding of movements and intersections.
Organized by Sietske Fransen, Elaine Leong, and Ahmed Ragab
Reconstructing the Medical Canon: Seventeenth-Century English Physicians and Their NotebooksView Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health04:00 PM - 04:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 14:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 14:30:00 UTC
Based on two collections of personal notebooks I will investigate the role of translation in the re-creation and reconstruction of the medical canon in seventeenth-century England. One of the results of the so-called “scientific revolution” on the traditional medical corpus was that classical medicine was re-framed and interspersed with vernacular, practical, and local knowledge. The medical practitioner John Ward (1629-1681), an Oxford man, left seventeen volumes of ‘diaries’ in which he recorded what he read, with whom he spoke or corresponded, and in which he noted down medical practices and recipes. A contemporary of his, the physician Daniel Foote (1629-1700), had trained in Cambridge. Foote left more than thirty-five volumes of notebooks, giving an insight into his university education and his many different interests and occupations. The Ward volumes, which have been described before, will form the context in which Daniel Foote’s collection will be analysed. Foote’s notebooks contain many extractions from canonical texts both in Latin and translated into English, but they also contain translations, from Latin, German, Dutch, and French lesser-known texts into English. Apart from textual translations the volumes also contain books of tables, summarizing and visualizing classical and vernacular medical information into manageable portions. By comparing the note-taking practices of these two medical practitioners, this talk will make clear how translation of texts and practices from a variety of sources was essential in building a new medical canon.
Sietske Fransen Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute For History Of Art
The Urge to Gloss: Multilingualism in the Making of ṬibbView Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health04:30 PM - 05:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 14:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 15:00:00 UTC
Manuscripts of medical texts composed in medieval and early modern South Asia frequently included glossaries (“farhang”) of technical terminology. These were structured around entries for disease categories in Arabic, with translations in Persian and "hindī" (vernacular South Asian languages). Medical glossaries, titled “farhang-i ṭibb,” or less commonly “lughat-i ṭibb," were part of a broader literary practice of producing farhangs in Persian literature. Glossaries were composed to accompany a variety of texts, from the Quran to epics of poetry. The medical glossaries were iteratively produced through reading, citation, medical practice and writing. Translation in these glossaries is not just the “transfer” of knowledge from one language to another; rather, it acknowledges the continued use of multiple languages, and enables readers with different kinds of linguistic skills. I draw on manuscripts of medical texts composed between the 14th and 16th centuries in Yemen and India to investigate the iterative and collaborative process through which these glossaries were produced -- and their role in the formation of the medical tradition known as "ṭibb." Modern scholarship on ṭibb, called Graeco-Arabic or Islamic medicine, has focused on texts composed in Arabic in the Near East. However, this focus neglects the life of ṭibb around the Indian Ocean World, where it underwent some of its most lasting developments. By analyzing the profusion of multilingual glossaries transmission from the western Indian Ocean World, I aim to understand ṭibb across a fuller geography, in which physicians worked continuously across linguistic regimes to pursue efficacious knowledge.
Presenters Shireen Hamza Harvard University, History Of Science Co-Authors
Sietske Fransen Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute For History Of Art
Nature in Rubrics: The Role of Taxonomies in Translating Arabo-Persian Physiology in Late Imperial ChinaView Abstract Organized SessionMedicine and Health05:00 PM - 05:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 15:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 15:30:00 UTC
During the 17th and 18th centuries a network of Chinese savants, interested in studying Arabo-Persian natural philosophy strove to reconcile conceptual and theoretical differences between the traditional Chinese and Arabo-Persian treatments of the natural world. For that end, members of that Sino-Islamic network experimented with methods of textual analysis and presentation with an explicit aim of bridging the linguistic, conceptual and theoretical gaps. The proposed talk will juxtapose the history of late imperial China's readership and the history of Chinese physiology, and spotlight the methods of translating and interpreting Arabic and Persian physiological knowledge by a number of Chinese savants during the mid-17th and early 18th centuries. It will focus on the use of taxonomies both as a didactic device and as a representation of the natural order. It will bring to light the challenges faced by translators in the negotiation of this foreign knowledge with the established Chinese categories, and the ways by which they were successful in reconciling the theoretical and conceptual differences. In this talk I will argue that organizing knowledge in rubrics was a translation device utilized by the Chinese translators to localize Arabo-Persian theories and concepts, and situate their scholarship on a par with the various projects of knowledge collecting and organizing that took place in China of the period. At the same time, the use of taxonomies allowed the translators and the promoters of Arabo-Persian knowledge to claim a universal applicability of their translated texts, and their representation of the natural order.
Sietske Fransen Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute For History Of Art
Commentary: Articulations and Disarticulations: Translation, Medicine, and Knowledge in the Premodern World, Session IIView Abstract Organized Session05:30 PM - 06:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/25 15:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/25 16:00:00 UTC
Shireen Hamza
