Medicine, Environment and Health in the Eastern Mediterranean World, 1400–1750, Christ’s College, Cambridge, April 3–4, 2017

Paper proposals are being sought for “Medicine, Environment and Health in the Eastern Mediterranean World, 1400-1750,” a conference organized by Valentina Pugliano (University of Cambridge) and Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers-Newark University), sponsored by The Wellcome Trust; Christ's College, Cambridge; and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (University of Cambridge), to be held on 3 & 4 April 2017, at Christ's College, Cambridge UK.

This conference aims to offer, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of medicine, environment and health in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, ca. 1400-1750. While a considerable body of scholarship exists on Islamic and Byzantine science and medicine and their influence on the medieval Latin West, the state of medical theory and practice in the following centuries has been comparatively neglected and often spoken of in terms of intellectual stagnation and decline. The conference aims to challenge this narrative and reveal the continued vitality of knowledge making and transfer across the eastern Mediterranean world. Taking as our focus the politically heterogeneous southern Europe and eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluk Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire, we aim to reconstruct the healthscape of this region in the early modern period, exploring its medical unity and disunity and the human and environmental factors that played a part in it.