Into the Water: Translating Medical Regimens Across the Medieval Indian Ocean World

The dominant learned medical tradition across the medieval Islamic world, often called Galenic medicine, was developed in the Mediterranean. In this tradition of medicine, bodies were constituted and affected by the specificities of place, which is often referred to as “airs, waters, places.” A key part of medical regimen was to dry and moisten, heat and cool the body using diet, water, and exercise. But what did it mean for this tradition of medicine to be practiced in a completely different environment from the Mediterranean, like the arid coastlines of Southern Arabia and Western India? How did waterside spaces, from hammams to stepwells, from tanks to riverbanks, play a role in maintaining health and preventing illness across a wide variety of climates?

I explore several key waterside spaces constructed under the Gujarat Sultanate in western India, considering their effects on the body alongside contemporary Persian medical texts in both the Galenic and Ayurvedic traditions. One stepwell and one medical text in particular were made in fifteenth century Ahmedabad and dedicated to the same sultan. Reading these discourses and spaces together, I engage literature on “translating science” — which is largely focused on textual translation — from a material and embodied lens. From this “periphery” of the medieval Islamic world, the history of medicine and environment at its “center” takes on surprising new aspects.