An Ottoman observer of central European surgery in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Evliya Celebi, a famous Ottoman traveller of the mid seventeenth century, has left us a written account of the places he visited in central Europe. This paper discusses operations that he claimed to have witnessed in Vienna in 1665, the most extraordinary of which was an example of neurosurgery, and it examines what his description tells us about perceptions and images of medicine. His impressions of central European medicine, as viewed by a Muslim from the east, offer a perspective so far little studied.