Eighteenth-century European medical encounters with the Ottoman levant

This essay is about some eighteenth-century cross-cultural encounters between Europeans and Ottomans. It mainly shows how eighteenth-century British and European travels and travel writings about the Ottoman Levant revealed the notion of plurality in the field of Enlightenment medicine. In reporting their medical encounters with Ottoman culture, British and European travellers showed their fascination with Levantine medical practices and medicines. Similarly, local cultures in the Ottoman Levant appreciated European medical knowledge. In these encounters, as this essay argues, a circulation of knowledge between East and West re-settles and complicates narratives of European triumphalism, heroism and colonialism usually attached to eighteenth-century European scientific travels and writing travels about non-Europeans.