Transmission of Knowledge between the Far East and the Middle East in the Mamluk/Mongol Period: The Case of Pharmacy

Leigh Chipman

This article describes various aspects of pharmacy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Muslim world was dominated by the Mamluk Empire in Egypt and Syria and the Mongol Ilkhans in Iran.
Exchanges of practical and theoretical knowledge occurred across the hostile frontier, but it remains to be seen to what extent this affected the practice of community pharmacists in the Islamic world, let alone the theory used by doctors learned in the Arabic pharmacological tradition. A major source for this information is a handbook for community pharmacists composed in Cairo in the mid-thirteenth century and much used thereafter.
My discussion of pharmacology in the Mongol world is based on the work of Paul Buell, specifically his studies of two Islamically-influenced works in Chinese dating to the Yuan period, a cookbook containing much dietetic advice and a pharmacopoeia. Conveniently, the foundation documents of two important contemporary hospitals, one located in Cairo and the other in Tabriz, afford an additional window into the status of hospital pharmacists under both regimes as well as a glimpse of the favored material medica.