Amirdovlat Amasyatsi (Armenian Ամիրդովլաթ Ամասիացի; in the sources Amirdovlat Amasiats'i, Amirdovlat of Amasia) was an Armenian physician and author of the fifteenth century. The ten or so works he left range from anatomy to clinical medicine and from pharmacology to toxicology, and all of them are in Armenian. The best known among them is Angitats Anpet, a great dictionary of drugs listing remedies of plant, animal and mineral origin by their names in several languages. The author signs his works with the epithet "of Amasya"; although he wrote most of his books in Istanbul and Philippopolis, he returned to Amasya at the end of his life, and a copy of one of the works in his possession was made for him in Amasya.

He was born in Amasya between 1420 and 1425; his father's name is given as Eghia (Elias). In his youth he travelled widely; according to Gueriguian he entered the service of Mehmed II in 1451 and settled in Istanbul after its conquest. At court he held the titles of chief surgeon and consulting physician to the sultan, and he also kept a private practice. After the Conqueror's death, at some date between 1483 and 1492, he returned to Amasya at the invitation of Prince Ahmed, and he died on 8 December 1496; some sources give the place of death as Bursa, others as Amasya. His life and the debates in the sources are told in detail in the biography Amirdovlat Amasyatsi.

Works

Amirdovlat wrote all his works not in classical Old Armenian (grabar) but in Middle Armenian, close to the spoken language of the day, and so his books addressed students and ordinary readers as well as scholars. The titles, dates and copies of the works do not agree in the sources. John L. Gueriguian, who treated Amirdovlat's works systematically in his 1987 study, says that this confusion can be cleared up only by direct examination of the manuscripts in Yerevan, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London, Paris, Venice and Vienna. The order below follows the list Gueriguian gives by date of composition. The English titles are our renderings of the Armenian ones; the Turkish page uses its own translations, since no established Turkish naming exists.

The Study of Medicine (Usumn Bzhshkutyan)

This is his first work, written in Istanbul in 1459. It deals with human anatomy, hygiene, pathology and pharmacology. The author's autograph copy is preserved in the Matenadaran in Yerevan, within manuscript no. 8871, together with two other works. The book is dedicated to Vard, son of Shadibek, who appears to have been a leading member of the Armenian community of Istanbul. Gueriguian notes that most scholars regard the work as a serious but not very original compilation of the medical knowledge of the day. Even so, a count of the Matenadaran copies shows that over the centuries this was the most widely copied and used of Amirdovlat's books.

The First Formulary

This is a book of drug formulas, likewise written in Istanbul in 1459 (Armenian Akhrapatin, from the Arabic aqrabadhin). The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes it as a detailed account of drugs and their effect on the various organs. According to Gueriguian, the historical importance of the work lies in the fact that it excerpts large fragments of early Armenian medical texts, corrects them where it finds them wrong and fits them into the format of a formulary. Since the author also wrote a second formulary and manuscript catalogues often fail to distinguish the two, it cannot be said without direct examination to which of them a given copy belongs.

Useful to Medical Practice (Ogut Bzhshkutyan)

Written in Philippopolis (today's Plovdiv) between 1466 and 1469, this work is regarded as Amirdovlat's clinical masterpiece. It is an expanded and corrected form of The Study of Medicine. A section on anatomy and physiology comes first; then the signs, causes and treatment of diseases are described in an order that begins with the head and moves down the body, ending with venereal and skin diseases. Gueriguian notes that some twenty headings are devoted to eye diseases and some fifteen chapters to diseases of the ear, nose and throat, and that the section on gynaecology and obstetrics deals with the function of the womb in pregnancy and childbirth, disorders of menstruation and the causes of infertility. Mental disorders such as mania, delirium, melancholy, depression, insomnia and epilepsy are also included. The place of writing coincides with the years when Mehmed II stayed in Philippopolis and Edirne during his Albanian campaigns; Gueriguian thinks Amirdovlat may have accompanied the sultan in these years. The work was published by S. Malkhasyants in Yerevan in 1940.

Minor Glossaries and Handbooks

Alongside the major works there are several small books, most of them little known in content:

  • Nomenclature and Commented Presentation of All Ills (Bar ew Patmutiwn Meknats Amenayn Tsavots), Istanbul 1459. Gueriguian writes that he found no information about this work.
  • Alphabetical Glossary of Illnesses, Philippopolis 1468. Despite its title it is a twenty-six-page glossary of the names of drugs.
  • Diagnosis of Illnesses or Glossary of Galen, Philippopolis 1468. It renders Galen's Greek medical terms into Armenian. In its colophon the author calls himself "the worthless and useless Amirdovlat the physician" and records that the work was finished on 22 January 1468.
  • Tabular Dictionary (Aghyusakerp Bararan), Philippopolis 1469. A very short medical dictionary in tabular form, usually appended to Useful to Medical Practice.
  • Book of Vulgarization (Girk Ramkakan), probably Philippopolis 1474. Its colophon says it was translated into Armenian "from the Tachik language"; whether this means Turkish or Arabic cannot be determined. Some scholars regard it as a book of astrology, others of geomancy.
  • Of the Signs of the Sick, of Life and Death (Vasn Nshanants Hivandin), Istanbul 1474. A short handbook the author wrote to teach his pupils bloodletting, minor operations and some emergency procedures. In the heading he presents himself as "chief surgeon and eye doctor" (charahpashi). Only one copy is known.

The Second Formulary

The second formulary, written in Istanbul in 1481, is according to Gueriguian a critical translation of the aqrabadhin of Maimonides: the author corrected and translated some 2,600 entries and added about a thousand of his own. The book is in three parts. The first gives pharmaceutical information such as prescriptions and the preparation and stability of compound drugs, the second gives the names, effects and uses of a great many drugs, and the third is a dictionary of drugs in Armenian, Greek, Frankish and Persian. The instructions telling plant gatherers which part of a plant to collect at what time of year, and how to dry it and in what vessels to keep it, are found in this book.

Angitats Anpet

Title and type: The Armenian Angitats Anpet ("Useless to the Ignorant") is an encyclopaedic dictionary of drugs in which simple remedies are arranged by name in an imperfect alphabetical order. The author explains the title thus: the book was given this name because the ignorant would not benefit from it. The title carries no arrogance; in the same introduction the author calls himself "the sinful, the useless and the unwise physician Amirdovlat of Amasya" and says that he "translated" the book. Gueriguian reminds us that in that age the word "translation" covered reading, collating, correcting, organising and improving alike.

Date and place of writing: According to Gueriguian, the introduction shows that the book was finished in Istanbul in 1482; the work had begun in 1478. As noted in the biography, other sources also give 1492 as the date of completion.

Contents: The book contains more than 3,700 entries for drugs of mineral, plant and animal origin and describes the effects, uses and toxicity of each. It rests on Arabic medicine and, through it, on Greek medicine; it refers frequently to Armenian and foreign physicians. The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes the work as an encyclopaedic polyglot in six languages including Persian; Gueriguian says the plant names are given in Arabic, Armenian, Frankish, Greek, Latin, Persian or Turkish. Gueriguian writes that he identified some 540 of these plants by their modern scientific names and that at least three quarters of them are still used as medicines in Africa, Asia and Europe. According to the Iranica, the author prefers wild plants as a source of drugs; he recommends saffron, mandrake and hashish as pain-relieving and sleep-inducing drugs, uses animal organs and minerals, especially common salt, in making drugs, and advises preparations with iron for abdominal and intestinal ailments and anaemia, and sulphur ointment for skin diseases.

The entries show the author to have been an observer working in the field. Of one plant he says: "it grows in the country of the Greeks, in Macedonia, around Constantinople and on the shores of the Black Sea; I found it in the countryside around Constantinople." In another entry, noting that a fruit an earlier author had called bitter is in fact slightly sweet, he adds: "This is not so." In the entry on garlic he writes that it helps toothache, ringworm when mixed with vinegar, lice and intestinal worms, but that it weakens the eyes and causes headaches, and that its harm is cancelled by vinegar. Of poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) he records that it is narcotic and brings sleep, and that the master physicians have said one should neither eat nor drink of this plant, because it maddens and kills people. Gueriguian shows that most of these observations agree with present-day knowledge.

Copies and editions: As reported in the biography, the oldest known copy was written in Sivas in 1490 on Amirdovlat's commission and is in the British Library; other copies are in the Matenadaran in Yerevan and in libraries in Venice, Vienna and Paris. Gueriguian's count of the Matenadaran copies shows that the work was copied and used by Armenian physicians until the end of the nineteenth century. The work was published in Vienna by K. Basmadjian; the year of publication is given as 1926 in the Iranica and 1927 in Gueriguian.

Copies and Translations He Commissioned

Besides his own books, Amirdovlat had the works of others copied. A colophon of 1480 says that a book was copied "at the behest of Amirdovlat the great scientist, who night and day concerns himself ceaselessly with scientific topics". According to a record by the monk Martiros, a precious Psalm Book brought to Istanbul from Mehmed II's campaign of 1473, in which Bayburt was burned, was "delivered from captivity" by the physician Amirdovlat. Gueriguian takes the episode as a sign that the physician was close enough to the sultan to gain admittance and save a prized manuscript from being sold. Another colophon says that he translated many works from Arabic and Persian into Armenian.

Amasya in His Works

None of Amirdovlat's works is known to have been written in Amasya; the known places of writing are Istanbul and Philippopolis. The name of the city appears in his texts above all as a signature: "Amasiatsi", that is, of Amasya. That he bears this epithet in all his books shows an author who spent most of his life in other cities still defining himself by the city of his birth. The colophon of one of his own books also says that he "used to live in the city of Amasia and later went to Constantinople".

The most concrete link with Amasya, however, is a record of copying. The manuscript registered as no. 1921 in the Matenadaran in Yerevan, containing philosophical writings and commentaries, was written in Amasya by a priest named Antreas on Amirdovlat's commission. The content of the colophon, given here in abridged form from Gueriguian's English translation, is as follows. After referring to himself in self-deprecating words, Antreas says that the book was finished at the wish of the physician Khoja Amirdovlat, who took a keen interest in philosophical works and translated many works from Arabic and Persian into Armenian. He relates that the physician was esteemed by the king of the Muslims, that he first lived in the city of Amasya, that he went to Istanbul at the Conqueror's call, and that after the king's death his grandson Sultan Ahmed sent for him, brought him to Amasya, the city where he had been raised, and welcomed him with much affection. He records that the book was copied at that very time, for the physician's enjoyment, and that the date was 1492.

This colophon is the earliest record of Amirdovlat's return to Amasya and shows that the return took place between 1483 and 1492. Gueriguian, pointing out that the title "Khoja" given to the physician in the colophon was at the time bestowed on Muslim teachers or high court officials, says that he was still a famous and respected man in Amasya. He adds that the records are silent on how long the physician stayed in Amasya and what he did there. As we have no access to the Armenian original of the colophon, we cannot give the original text here; the content reported rests on Gueriguian's translation.

That the oldest known copies of his works were written in Sivas and, in the following century, in Merzifon also suggests that Amirdovlat's books lived on among the Armenian physicians of the region of his birth. The date of the Merzifon copy and the person who commissioned it are given in the biography.

Influence and Assessment in the Sources

As far as can be judged from the distribution of the Matenadaran copies by century, Amirdovlat's works were used by Armenian physicians until the end of the nineteenth century. The most frequently copied were not his largest works: his first book, The Study of Medicine, together with Angitats Anpet and the minor glossaries, circulated more widely than Useful to Medical Practice, which is regarded as his clinical masterpiece.

Gueriguian explains his writing only in Armenian with the author's own words: Amirdovlat, who said that there was a void among the Armenians as to the knowledge of drugs and that for this reason they had become dependent on foreigners, wanted to break that dependence. Gueriguian notes that the choice found a response for more than four centuries, but also that it made the physician's importance invisible outside the Armenian world. The choice of Turkish by Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin, who came out of Amasya in the same century, rests on a similar concern; there is, however, no document showing that the two physicians knew each other. For Sabuncuoğlu's works see Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin: Writer and Works.

In Gueriguian's assessment Amirdovlat was neither an ethno-folklorist nor a simple empiricist. His definition separating drugs from foods and poisons ("the human being takes control over the food while the medicament takes control over the human being"), his principle that a drug should be tested in only one disease at a time, and the weight he gave to observations of animals, such as drawing pharmacological knowledge from a swallow rubbing its hurt eyes with a herb, make him, in Gueriguian's words, "a major scientific figure of premodern medicine". The Encyclopaedia Iranica likewise counts Angitats Anpet as by far its author's most important accomplishment. Gueriguian ends his study with the guess that there is much to be rediscovered in these works, scientifically, historically and philologically.

Bibliography

Online sources