Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Around the clock: Time in medieval Islamic clinical cultures - NIH grant application: Project summary/Abstract (30lines of text) Physicians are always out of time. Burnout is a key risk in medical practice today. For medieval physicians, this fact was as old as the profession: Hippocrates famously encapsulated this complaint in his Aphorisms: “The art is long, and life is short.” There was truth to this aphorism. Studying medicine was a long and arduous process; prospects of financial gain were uncertain, and practice meant seeing many patients in little time. This grant will support writing a book under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press. The book investigates the history of time as a medical category: what it meant in medical thought and practice, in understanding bodies and diseases, in professional development, and in medical ethics, and how it interacted with the religious, cultural, and social meanings of time. Medieval physicians and patients contended with acute conditions and emergencies, chronic conditions, and disabilities, and disease progress, which was thought to be influenced by astrological conditions. Time was also key to understanding the human body, which was influenced by seasons and changed by age. The proposed book investigates the production of time as a conceptual and practical category in medieval Islamic medicine. “Time” here is seen here as a cultural category understood at the intersection of the theoretical and practical and as a locus of meaning-making. It also acquires additional texture within non- medical cultural constructions. In this context, “medical time” encountered the five daily prayers, the religious feasts, and the lunar and solar calendars. In short, this book aims to investigate the thick web of meanings that made “time” a sensible and comprehensible, if not always coherent, category. The book starts with an analysis of how time, manifesting in the passage of seasons and other astronomical phenomena, was seen as a medical category. I then investigate how time manifests on the body, considering age and age-related conditions. Time was also key in understanding sex and gender. Female bodies were thought to develop in utero and reach puberty later than male bodies, and female bodies were medically understood in relation to fertility and menstruation. I then investigate time in the patient-physician encounter, diagnosis, and treatment, in the development of diseases and disease categories, and in epidemic conditions. Finally, time is an important ethical category: from the beginning of life to death, to elder care, to the management of a physician’s time. I will look at the place of time in the making of Islamic medical ethics. The book will significantly enhance our understanding of medieval Islamic medicine, have important implications on how we understand medical practice, issues of time management, burnout and other related questions. Moreover, the book will address how these conceptions of time played an important role in the making of medical ethics especially in relation to Muslim physicians and Muslim communities. The book will be an important addition to our understanding of Islam and medicine in the past and how it impacts the present.
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