Faithful Reproductions: Translation and Figural Representation in Ottoman Anatomy

This paper reconstructs the social and material conditions of early-nineteenth century Istanbul which enabled the initial mass reproduction of anatomical illustrations in the Ottoman Empire. The first printed Ottoman Turkish anatomy book, a compilatory translation by the Ottoman physician Şanizade Ataullah Efendi, (d. 1826.) was published in 1820 with the name Mirror of Bodies in the Anatomy of the Parts of Human. As an idiosyncratic member of the Ottoman ʿulama, or Muslim scholarly class, Şanizade knew Italian and French in addition to the Greco-Islamic medical cannon and drew from a number of eighteenth-century European anatomical texts in compiling his Mirror. Much of the twentieth-century scholarship on Şanizade and his work is concerned with his significance as a proto-modernizer of Turkish medicine understood in national terms. Yet the very anatomical illustrations that the Mirror is prized for reproducing were painstakingly made by Ottoman Armenian copperplate engravers. In my paper I raise the questions: Who was allowed to (re)produce anatomical representations of the human body in early-nineteenth century Istanbul? How were they able to do it? And how did anatomical knowledge transform in the process of its textual and visual translation? I rely on Ottoman archival sources and a close reading of the Mirror to show the integral role played by Ottoman Armenian craftsmen such as Agop Erzurumi and the technical possibilities of the Ottoman Imperial Printing Press in the construction of this mass publication.