The Hamidiye Children’s Hospital was founded in 1899 in the Ottoman capital under the patronage of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909). Following its inauguration, the hospital published comprehensive statistical yearbooks (1900-1908) to commemorate the sultan’s accession to the throne and to summarise medical information regarding the treated patients. The yearbooks, written mainly in Ottoman Turkish and French, also contain diverse photographs related to the hospital which were taken by the photography studio established on the premises. These photographs attesting to the modernised healthcare system were not only circulating thanks to the yearbooks sent to institutions abroad as gifts, but they were also frequenting the pages of local newspapers such as Servet-i Fünûn and Malûmat, as well as foreign periodicals. In other words, Abdülhamid II continued the same controlled image circulation policy as he previously did with the Library of Congress in 1893, and the British Museum in 1894, when he sent photography albums showing the modernisation efforts of the Ottoman Empire as discussed in studies by William Allen, and Muhammad Isa Waley. Hence, what might appear at first sight as a magnanimous act of philanthropy on the part of the sultan turns out to be well-calculated imperial propaganda. I argue that with the Hamidiye Children’s Hospital, the sultan aimed to convince and impress both the Ottoman subjects under his rule, and the international powers by portraying a modernised imperial image of scientific advancement on a par with the Western countries, and he specifically utilised photographs to this end. I further suggest that by focusing his attention on children’s health and sustaining the image of a sorrowful father who lost a child of his own to diphtheria, Abdülhamid II was aspiring to rectify his negative image as “the Red Sultan” due to the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, striving to replace the image of tyrannical, cruel, and bloody autocrat, e.g. in satirical caricatures, with that of a compassionate and caring father. Therefore, examining how photographs of the Hamidiye Children’s Hospital circulated in the local and international press would add new dimensions to Abdülhamid II’s image policy and expand on how he instrumentalised photography as a form of imperial propaganda. Moreover, this study aims to analyse the photographs from the yearbooks as early examples of Ottoman medical photography, a topic which has received very scant scholarly attention, and evaluate how they relate to the history of medical photography, and Ottoman modernisation.