Medicine and politics in the late Ottoman Empire (1876-1909)

Abstract

This thesis, as a work of social history, studies medicine as political phenomena through its three aspects: public hygiene within the urban space, syphilis and forensics, in the late Ottoman Empire. As a result of the conception of medicine as political, this study deals with the issue within the framework of relations of power and domination. Thus, it focuses on acts of different social and historical actors determined by the strategic positions of each within the social hierarchy. Within this framework, this study analyses the policies in the medical realm from the standpoint of social stratification. The period selected to study, the reign of Abdülhamid II, was a turning point in terms of the occurrence of an immediate acceleration in the efforts of the political power towards the medical and political control of the social body. However, the policies of public health which were planned to become highly intrusive in the lives of the poor masses engendered their resistance in the form of refusal and escape. On the other hand, within the framework of resistance, forensics as an illustration of the incorporation of medicine into the law towards the constitution of a normative social order was perceived by the weak as a tool to contest the abusive power of the agents of the modern state.