Sharif Islam
3 min readJun 2, 2021

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Not unlike their modern counterparts in epidemiology and public health, the authors of the most important Ottoman plague treatises were leading scholars striving to combat this existential threat to state and society. They presented plague as a social problem, a disease of the body politic, just as much as an environmental problem.

their manuals were often emphatically .

By any premodern definition, then, the placebo effect is simply a form of magic. Which term we use is unimportant for practical purposes: either way, the fact is that mind can affect matter under the right circumstances. The point is to harness these mind-matter interactions to achieve positive health outcomes.

This powerful, magical effect was recognised and routinely utilised — on the authority of Plato himself — by premodern Muslim, Jewish and Christian physicians. Our triumphalist narrative of scientific progress notwithstanding, and the antibiotic revolution aside, in many cases premodern treatments work roughly as well as modern medicine.

In a time of global traumas, it seems only rational to use the power of belief as part of our basic hygiene, too.

source: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

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Sharif Islam

Data Architect@Distributed System of Scientific Collections (https://dissco.eu). PhD in Sociology. Bachelor's in Math and CS from the University of Illinois.