Ingrid Hehmeyer
Department of History Ryerson University Toronto
Canada

Dr. Ingrid Hehmeyer, Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology, is an agricultural engineer who specializes in human-environmental relationships in the arid regions of ancient and mediaeval Arabia. Her current field research focusses on the history of water technology in mediaeval Yemen, where she investigates technical innovations in hydraulic engineering and strategies for water management that allowed people to live under harsh environmental conditions. Part of this project involves a study of the methods of astronomical timekeeping used for allocating water, during both day and night. Her second area of research is the history of the medical sciences in the Islamic world. As a licensed pharmacist, she is particularly interested in the use of medicinal substances and their manufacture, and she has studied the pharmaceutical utensils from the mediaeval Islamic period housed at the Royal Ontario Museum. The perpetual menace of disease on the one hand, and of water scarcity on the other – the two most fundamental threats to the basis of life – led people to resort to magical measures in the hopes that these might change the course of events. Tangible evidence for this exists in the form of magic-medicinal bowls, talismans and astrological symbols, which form a major theme in her research.