Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 194-195. (Budapest, 2006)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - KÁROLY, László: A Seventeenth-Century Chaghatay Treatise on Medicine

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHAGHATAY TREATISE ON MEDICINE LÁSZLÓ KÁROLY 1. Introduction Chaghatay can be defined as a form of written Turkic used in Central Asia from the fifteenth century up to World War I.

1 From this huge period, a great number of written records have come down to us. Thus, scientists are in a relatively favourable position to describe the history of the Turkic communities which used Chaghatay as a literary language. Nevertheless, some areas of their cultural life cannot be examined in detail as they are hardly dealt with by the available sources. These areas include medicine: for instance, there is no written record from the Chaghatay period that deals with veterinary medicine.

2 In spite of the fact that few sources written in Chaghatay contain information about Turkic medical history, there is a unique work which serves as an indispensable source describing late Chaghatay medical history. In comparison with other works, it provides an extremely large amount of material on medicine; however, it is unpublished and almost unknown. The first 12 folios (8v(M4r9) of the treatise were translated into German by Armin Vámbéry (1867: 164-172). The treatise itself was subsequently mentioned only a few times: some of the more significant works include Thúry (1904: 59-60), Eckmann (1964: 378) andHofman (1969: 271).

3 In the present paper, this treatise will be discussed with its details as a modest step towards the full critical edition.

4 ' For a more detailed description, see Eckmann (1966: 6-10) and Boeschoten-Vandamme (1998: 166). 2 To the best of my knowledge, there is only one Eastern Middle Turkic written record on this topic, the Kitäb Baytäral al-väzih: "It is an indispensable source book both for the description of Mamluk-Kipchak and for research into the history of the Turkic lexicon in general. Secondly, it is one of those rare Islamic medical works which discusses formulas for the individually described diseases, gives practical advice on their application, and reports on veterinary experience with various drugs and diseases." (Bodrogligeti 1975: 1 lóin). 3 As the author had not given a title to his work, Vámbéry named it Tabïblik kitâbï (Book of Medicine) and later works have referred to it by this name. 4 Here I must remark that I am not a physician; I introduce this source from the point of view of a linguist, with emphasis on the problems that 1 think may be of interest for a physician.