Ahmed Ragab – ‘House for King and Slave’: Patients and Medical Practice in the Medieval Islamic Hospital

Heyman Center for the Humanities, Second Floor Common Room

Speaker: Ahmed Ragab, Richard T. Watson Associate Professor of Science and Religion, Harvard Divinity School

Discussant: Marwa Elshakry, Associate Professor of History, Columbia University

This event is part of the series Explorations in the Medical Humanities. More details coming soon. Please visit the Heyman Center website for updates.

About the Series:

As a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences that resist easy verbal categorization such as illness, pain, and healing. The recent emergence of interdisciplinary frameworks such as narrative medicine has offered a set of methodological approaches to address these challenges. Yet conceptualizing a field of medical humanities also offers a broader umbrella under which to study the influence of medico-scientific ideas and practices on society. Whether by incorporating material culture such as medical artefacts, performing symptomatic readings of poems and novels, or excavating the implicit medical assumptions underlying auditory cultures, the approaches that emerge from a historiographical or interpretive framework are different from those coming from the physician’s black bag.

Sponsored by The Society of Fellows in the Humanities, the Center for Science and Society, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities.