Chapter 3 - Therapeutic mediations: Shiʿa medical imagination and cholera

Summary

Abstract

In this chapter, I begin with a talismanic remedy for cholera, an absurdist object that claims to prevent or treat cholera by means of its ciphered and scriptural semiotics. One can accordingly distinguish between two medical regimes evolving along separate trajectories in the period, the clinical medicine (ṭebb-e jadid) and the traditional one (ṭebb-e qadim). The talisman I analyse in this chapter may thus be examined as a meaningful object dissociated from modern sciences. I examine a number of medical sources written on cholera by both clinicians and traditionalists in the nineteenth century. Close-reading these materials, I map out two gustatory-olfactory models, each forming a distinct sensory experience in relation to the cholera epidemics in the century. In the traditionalist model, the work of Musā Ebn-e ʿAlireḍā Ṣāvoji, Cure of Cholera, is analysed closely. I attend to both the linguistic and visual aspects of this text to show how this text represents a pathological model in which the sense of taste and smell play significant parts. In contrast, my analysis of two medical documents written by two staff members at the Dār al-Fonun, namely Joseph Désiré Tholozan and Johan Louis Schlimmer, shows a different conception of the body at work in the clinical model, one with distinctively diminished gustatory and olfactory affordances.

Keywords: talismans, medical history, cholera, humoral medicine, olfaction, gustation

Not all meaningful absurd objects in the period syncretised Islamic and new scientific semiotics. Some remained far apart from sciences and avoided any form of conversation with new developments but remained meaningful for the reforming society in Iran and consequential for the rising scientific community. The medical field was particularly fraught with such scientifically unresponsive objects. The following absurd instance is a case in point. During one of the cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century, sometime in 1853, this object appeared in a Persian medical treatise on cholera (figure 8), titled The Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabā). It was a talismanic diagram in the form of a circle comprised of several concentric rings. The author of the medical text, Musā Ebn-e ʿAlireḍā Sāvoji (d. around the middle of the nineteenth century), prescribes this circle for protection against and treatment of cholera.