Abstract
Modern Masculinity on Display: City Pharmacists as Men of Science
Pharmacists were the most public face of modern medicine in late-Ottoman and modern Egyptian society. While visits to the nurse or doctor were private moments behind closed doors, the new botanical and chemical compounding pharmacists were early adopters of vitrines, and put modern medicine on display for passersby in urban settings. In contrast to the old apothecaries, which displayed dried bunches of herbs on the front wall and over the doorway into fairly dark interiors, the new pharmacies showcased modern, mustachioed and jacketed men of science working with technical tools of the trade and neat rows of clearly labeled products. They were also active in treatment of refugee populations in the cities, work that continued into WWI and post-war refugee camps throughout the empire and Turkish Republic, and in that setting were many villagers’ first encounters with urban medical practice. As well, advertising in the serial press was used to teach readers names and properties of such new treatments as aspirin, while creating product and pricing lists that combined new and traditional remedies supported by laboratory work in the Istanbul branch of Bayer and the botanical gardens and laboratories of the medical schools. Ottoman and Egyptian pharmacology training had been generously funded since the early 1800s, and by the late 19th century had gone through two generations of increasingly confident translations and locally written texts on pharmacology. These pharmacists presented their work at conferences throughout Europe and saw their work reported in The Lancet such that, when Cincinnati pharmacist and entrepreneur John Uri Lloyd arrived in Izmir on a Smithsonian mission to study Anatolian licorice in 1906, he found himself among equals, not imitators. The paper draws on pharmacology textbook translations, the Egyptian, Ottoman, and foreign serial press, memoir, and photography to document and analyze Ottoman pharmacists as creators of a new urban masculine identity: the modern man of laboratory science and public medical practice. The analysis brings urban history into engagement with Marwa el-Shakry’s exploration of a universal language of science expressed in local vernaculars, and with work on masculinities by Chacko Jacob, Ryzova, Y?ld?z, Wishnitzer, and others.
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