The Life and Times of Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi (d. 1692): Anxieties of Religious Conversion and Medical Translation (Duygu Yildirim)
This paper explores how and why certain medical translations became successful during the times of religious conflict in the early modern era. By focusing on the understudied relation between religious conversion and medical discourse, this paper scrutinizes the Ottoman imperial physician, Hayatizade Mustafa’s (d. 1692) medical work entitled, Curative Treatise for Difficult Diseases. As a Jewish convert to Islam, Hayatizade’s translations provided him a space in which he used the discourses of “utility” and “progress” to refute classical Islamic medical tradition. Hayatizade’s engagement with melancholy reveals the ways in which medical discourse became a polarized setting where religious identities were negotiated during the time of religious conflict in the Ottoman Empire.
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