Building Blocks: State, Citizenship, and the Transformation of Child Health in the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Turkey This paper examines the development of children’s healthcare in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican history (1850s through 1940s) at the intersection of citizenship and nation-building by paying particular attention to the increasing efforts to redefine relationships between children’s and women’s health and state by governing their bodies. Based on archival documents, as well as medical treatises, and pamphlets from the period, this research underscores the role of the trans-imperial intermediaries in the medical knowledge creation and transfer. It sheds light on the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican physicians’ efforts to eliminate inequalities in the healthcare system by expanding accessibility and specialization. The pioneering physicians such as Besim Ömer Pasha (known as Besim Ömer Akalın in the Republican period) underlined the need for the “democratization of medicine” and initiated the developments that led to specialization in children’s healthcare, which later evolved into modern pediatrics. Tracing the early phases of the development of comprehensive pediatric care, this paper focuses on various aspects of the modernization processes in medicine in the period between the 1850s to 1940s. It also addresses healthcare professionals’ entanglements with biopolitics via population control and designing desired citizens from infancy onward by way of engineering and/or correcting children’s behavior. Many traditional medical practices that are related to childbirth, children’s health, and child behavior underwent substantial changes in this transitional period. This paper also contextualizes the genesis of Ottoman/Turkish pediatrics with an eye on the developments in European and American medical models during the same period.