Spektrum Iran

Abstract Karin Knorr Cetina developed the concept of postsocial relations to explain how epistemic objects assume increasingly central roles in organizing knowledge, expertise, and social interaction within late modern scientific and technological environments. While this framework has primarily been applied to contemporary settings, its broader historical applicability remains largely unexplored. This article investigates whether medieval Persian medicine may offer a historically distinct case of object-centered epistemic relations that is analytically comparable to the relational dynamics described in postsocial theory. Focusing on Persian medicine between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, the study employs a historical-conceptual methodology grounded in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Drawing upon secondary historical scholarship, the analysis examines manuscripts, hospitals, pharmaceutical substances, medical instruments, and pedagogical practices as material components of an epistemic culture. These historical materials were selected according to their documented roles in organizing medical knowledge, professional authority, and institutional practice, and are interpreted through the analytical concepts of epistemic objects and object-centered relationality. The findings indicate that these material entities functioned as dynamic and open-ended centers of epistemic engagement, structuring learning, clinical practice, and scholarly communities in ways that exhibit important structural similarities to the characteristics Knorr Cetina associates with epistemic objects. Rather than arguing that medieval Persian medicine constituted a postsocial society in the strict historical sense, the article proposes that it developed historically specific object-centered relational configurations that expand the temporal and geographical horizon within which postsocial theory may be productively interpreted. By bringing medieval Persian medicine into dialogue with contemporary STS, the study contributes both to the globalization of Science and Technology Studies and to the historiography of medicine, demonstrating how non-Western historical epistemic cultures can serve not only as empirical illustrations of sociological concepts but also as productive sites for their critical refinement.

Abstract Works of Islamic medicine in Persian have been underresearched. The present study deals with a work by Faḫr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī, which is to be described as a manual of medical knowledge and medical therapies.