History of Iranian Medical Sciences and the Identity of Patient in Old Iranian Medical Texts

This study investigates the linguistic expression features of patients’ identity and gender inold medical texts. Six medical texts from the fourth up to about thirteenth century has been studied. During these years, medical practice is noticed to be more scientific than the years before or even after that. That is, it was far from superstitious and used to follow the scientific approaches of the day. In this study, we focused on the book “Khofi Allaee” in more details, because of its scientific context and its importance in the history of medical sciences. This book was intended to be a kind of pocket book for people, to be read while in the trips or something being accessible at the time of emergency when they are out. The word ‘Khofi’ in Arabic language means ‘boot’ and the book was published in two volumes so that each volume could be placed inside one of the boots while the carrier (person) was out. Identity and power are among the issues investigated broadly in sociolinguistics. The present study was designed to analyze the books in through sociolinguistics perspective.More specifically, the study tends to find the gender as well as the social status of thepatient implied in the text.