Buṭlān

A witty satire of the medical profession

The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an eleventh-century satire in the form of a novella, set in a medical milieu. A young doctor from out of town is invited to dinner with a group of older medical men, whose conversation reveals their incompetence. Written by the accomplished physician Ibn Buṭlān, the work satirizes the hypocrisy of quack doctors while displaying Ibn Buṭlān’s own deep technical knowledge of medical practice, including surgery, blood-letting, and medicines. He also makes reference to the great thinkers and physicians of the ancient world, including Hippocrates, Galen, and Socrates.

Combining literary parody with social satire, the book is richly textured and carefully organized: in addition to the use of the question-and-answer format associated with technical literature, it is replete with verse and subtexts that hint at the infatuation of the elderly practitioners with their young guest. The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an entertaining read in which the author skewers the pretensions of the physicians around the table.

An English-only edition.

Ibn Buṭlān (Author)
Ibn Buṭlān (d. 460/1068) was a Christian physician and scholar from Baghdad.

Philip F. Kennedy (Translator)
Philip F. Kennedy is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, and General Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature. He is the author of Recognition in the Arabic Narrative Tradition.

Jeremy Farrell (Translator)
Jeremy Farrell holds a Ph.D. from Emory University. His publications analyze diverse aspects of pre-modern Islamic society, including sarcastic speech acts, transgressive modes of piety, and the formation of cooperative networks.