This collection of essays is the first volume of two (the second is reviewed below), which began at an eponymous conference, hosted at the Indian Ocean World Centre. As the editors explain in the introduction, considering the Indian Ocean world (IOW) a single geographic region is a relatively new claim which the book seeks to ‘test’ (p. 2). The collection provides a sampling of various kinds of medical theory and practice found historically in parts of the Middle East, South Asia and South East Asia on the littoral of the Indian Ocean. The range of languages, methods and types of source used is instructive, and the contributors are affiliated with geographically diverse academic institutions.

The volume starts with an essay by Mahmud Angrini on a treatise on joint pain by Abu Bakr Al-Razi (d. 923), Risalah fi Awja’ al-Mafasil. Since this treatise only exists in three manuscripts, Angrini presents a detailed description of the contents. After a brief explanation of humoral theory, he describes al-Razi's conception of joints as containing blank spaces, which become filled with the excretions from digestion in the veins and excesses of the four humours. Al-Razi's description of the small saphenous vein differs from those provided in Galen's anatomical texts, which Angrini attributes to al-Razi's reliance on clinical observation; this text includes six clinical case studies. Further, al-Razi offers a description of capillaries centuries before Malpighi, to whom the full discovery is attributed; Angrini provides the passage in translation but without any key Arabic terms. Angrini also compares the content of the treatise with similar content in al-Razi's other texts, concluding that the theoretical explanation of joint pain in the treatise is not included in al-Razi's best-known text, al-Hawi.

An essay by Amanda Respess and Lisa Niziolek provides the inventory of medical artefacts from the Java Sea Wreck, a thirteenth-century wrecked trading vessel found near Indonesia, housed in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. The ship set sail between the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties carrying a load of ceramics, potentially from the port of Quanzhou. The authors contextualize the artefacts within the reproductive medicine of China, in a period just after the emergence of fuke (lit. ‘wives’ medicine’). Since pieces of ivory were found in the wreck, passages from Chinese medical texts on ivory powder's effect on sexual imbalance are included. With a piece of resin, the authors included the use of myrrh as an analgesic for labour pains in both Ibn Sina's eleventh-century al-Qānūn fī ‘l-Ṭibb (Canon of Medicine) and its Yuan Dynasty adaptation, Hui Hui Yaofang (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries). They describe the gendered symbolism and forms of various ceramics in detail, emphasizing exchanges and continuities along the Maritime Silk Road.

The following essay on fertility rituals on the Malabar Coast from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by P.K. Yasser Arafath draws on various missionary travel narratives to describe local practices at kavus (sacred groves), churches, temples, dargahs and masjids. Some practices worked to appease ‘terrifying’ goddesses, who had the power to ward off illness or enhance fertility. Arafath notes that some originated in lower-caste communities, as with the Tiyya community's theyyam dances to appease Chamundi, who could cause smallpox in pregnant women if enraged. Celebrations on the birth/death anniversary of Sufi saints, as at Calicut's Sheikh Masjid, became curative spaces for fertility seekers. Collections of hagiographic songs recited at these events and other panegyric texts in Malayalam, as well as Malayalam–Arabic texts of healing, are described, some perhaps for the first time for an anglophone audience. The evil eye is discussed at length in these latter texts, and Muslim and Hindu strategies for protecting against it. No sources are cited in the author's claim of an opposition between traditional Muslim scholars and Unani medicine, the latter of which apparently was not practised. The claim that Galenic/Unani medicine is opposed to prophetic medicine regarding the medieval Islamic world has long been disproven by contemporary scholars. Sources are not mentioned for the magic-bowl practices, which would have been of great interest, as a similar practice is well documented in the medieval to early modern Middle East. There are a few moments of slippage between contemporary practices, primary historical sources and texts by missionaries, as with the discussion of medieval snakebites on page 112. Interesting ideas for regional boundaries like the ‘shafiite knowledge grid in the IOW’ and the ‘transnational Hadrami complex’ are left unexplained (pp. 100, 108).

S. Jeyaseela Stephen's essay on the understudied history of Siddha medicine explores the circulation of Tamil manuscripts and their translations between 1700 and 1857 by various European missionaries, who sought to render a service to their countrymen. Eighteenth-century Protestant and Jesuit missionaries in the Tamil coast utilized Siddha remedies, observed doctors and sent home both original manuscripts and translations of the texts. Friar Jean-Baptiste du Choiseul's translation of portions of the Sillarai Kovai was published in 1756 in Paris and studied by Louis Pasteur. Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg arrived in the Tamil coast in 1706, studied under a Tamil Siddha doctor and sent two Tamil manuscripts back to Denmark, which ended up in Halle. Johann Gruendler's German rendition of Agastiyar Irandaayiram (completed in 1711) can be found in the same archive, and a Danish surgeon, Folly, translated a portion of this text on mercury sublimation, as mercury was in use to treat syphilis both on the Tamil coast and in Europe at the time. Various East India Company (EIC) physicians like Benjamin Heyne and Whitelaw Ainslie studied Siddha texts in their studies of native plants, and their books on materia medica were printed in London. Stephen provides a summary of the principles of Siddha medicine, a description of the contents of most Tamil texts mentioned, and an explanation of the poetic form of the texts.

The final essay in this volume by Minakshi Menon explores the EIC in late eighteenth-century south India, and the way it functioned as a ‘company–state’ which administered law and punishment and collected taxes (p. 151). Menon explains the commerce and governance through the lens of the relationship between a Scottish surgeon and botanist for the EIC, William Roxburgh, and his chief patron, a free merchant in Madras, Andrew Ross. Ross and other free merchants helped Company (medical) men like Roxburgh move up the ranks in the EIC and make a private fortune. Menon also explores Roxburgh's medical education at Edinburgh and the way it trained him to make natural knowledge which would be commercially profitable, such as in his later cultivation of pepper, indigo and cotton. Menon quotes letters to demonstrate how Ross shaped and sometimes dictated Roxburgh's work, even encouraging him in ventures to make money for himself. Simultaneously, they participated in EIC decision making, as when Ross utilized Roxburgh's investigations to push the building of a canal, and Roxburgh created the post of company botanist.

The volume editors posit the relevance of Graeco-Arabic/Unani medical texts to the IOW, as the detailed introduction cites much modern scholarship on this tradition, and the volume begins with an essay about a tenth-century text of al-Razi's. However, those essays making arguments about Arabic texts from this tradition do not define the realm of influence of these sources in the medieval and early modern IOW. All of the volume's essays are thorough and engaging, and bring much novel research to the anglophone scholarly community.