In between the Old and the New: The Birth of the First Maternity Hospital in the Ottoman Empire The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the dizzying transformation of the medical sciences and healthcare practices. From pasteurization to the transformation of midwifery, changes in medicine and pharmaceutical sciences provide useful lenses to observe the political and social transformation on a global scale. Besim Omer (Akalin) Pasha (1862-1940), the founder of the first maternity hospital, was one of the most influential actors of modern healthcare in the history of the Ottoman Empire and later the Turkish Republic. He studied in France as a medical doctor and wrote more than a hundred books in various subfields of medicine. As a prominent Ottoman scholar (of his time period), Besim Omer Pasha also attended numerous international conferences often putting the Ottoman medical world on the radar of global healthcare professionals. One could argue modernization process in the Ottoman medical field and healthcare happened almost simultaneously with the European and North American counterparts even though the empire was in social and economic turmoil and fighting for its survival. Besim Omer Pasha and the continuation of his medical work from the 19th to the 20th century provides an excellent case study to reflect on the transition from an empire to a republic as a continuous process not as a moment of sudden rupture. This paper focuses on the first viladethane (maternity hospital) in the Ottoman Empire (opened in 1892 in Demirkapi) to examine the institutional transformation from traditional medicine to modern medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by closely examining women’s reproductive health, their reproductive rights, and their bodies as medical sites. Based on Omer Pasha’s own writings as well as archival records, this paper will investigate how Omer Pasha navigated the complex political transformation of the late Ottoman Empire into Republican Turkey to be able to establish the first maternity hospital.