Mūsā Cālīnūs’ Treatise on the Natures of Medicines and Their Use

• Main Author: Robert Morrison
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Scientific Studies Association (ILEM) 2016-10-01
• Series: Nazariyat: Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences
• Subjects: Beyazid II; medicine; Arnaldo di Villanova; pharmacology; al-Kindī; Ibn Rushd
• Online Access: https://nazariyat.org/content/5-sayilar/5-cilt3-sayi1/4-m0034/robert-morrison.pdf

This article introduces and presents a transcription and annotated translation of a medical text in Ottoman Turkish authored by Mūsā Cālīnūs (d. after 1542). The treatise is entitled Risāla fī Tabā’i‘ al-adviya va-isti‘mālihā (Treatise on the Natures of Medicines and Their Use). This article analyses the degrees of the qualities (e.g., heat, cold, wetness, and dryness) of various materia medica and how, on that basis, certain drugs affect, effect, and preserve health. There are three reasons why this brief, seemingly pedestrian text merits more extensive study. First, it refers to the medieval Latin physicians Bernard de Gordon (fl. 1270-1330) and Arnaldo di Villanova (1234-1310) for perhaps the first time in Turkish (and Islamic) literature. Second, Mūsā Cālīnūs must have believed that there was an audience at Beyazid II’s court for the contents of medical texts composed in Latin. Third, as Mūsā Cālīnūs is a probable conduit through which information about the astronomy of Islamic societies could have reached the Veneto around 1500, his interest in the contents of Latin medical texts meant that he was a scholarly intermediary who carried information in at least two directions.