'Are Turks Degenerate?' Socio-Medical Fears of National Degeneration in the Early 20th Century Testifying at the trial of a colleague accused of brutality against shell-shocked soldiers in the Great War, Freud suggested that during the War "physicians were put into a role like that of machine guns behind the front, of driving fugitives back." Any one of the Ottoman neuropsychiatrists might have said the same thing about themselves, but none did. During the War, they were also put in charge of diagnosing, curing, or uncovering the possible simulations of those soldiers who seemed to have suffered mental breakdown, malingered, or repeatedly deserted. This was a charge they took seriously. What they claimed to have witnessed certainly did not fit the imagined picture of a "military nation." They were dismayed at the number of war neurotics (or hysterics as the doctors called them) who lingered in hospitals, malingerers who simulated disease to escape war, and deserters who left the ranks (up to 500,000 of them). By the war's end, neuropsychiatrists came to pathologize war neurosis, captivity psychosis, malingering, and even desertion as diseases of the "will" and clear signs of "degeneracy." In other words, what they perceived as "badness" and dangerous they turned into pathological illness. They regretted at the end of the war that the Great War took away the brave and fit as martyrs and left behind the "degenerates" and "psychopaths." While some neuropsychiatrists argued that "psychopaths" constituted one-third of the post-war population, they also asked: "Are Turks Degeneratet" Viewing themselves as bulwark against a possible "national degeneration," many doctors feared for the nation's health. In the light of Morel's theory of "degeneration," coupled with social Darwinism, a new psychiatric paradigm emerged. Interest in the hereditary components of mental and physical illnesses, as well as the "dire demographic situation," in Turkey helped shift the object of inquiry from bodies to populations. Accordingly, nearly the whole nation was medicalized as the neuropsychiatrists joined a cacophony of voices who offered solutions to nurse the nation back to health. In the fight against real and pseudo-diseases during the interwar years, neuropsychiatrists, as agents of the state, aimed to reach every corner of the new republic in attempting to eradicate disease and regulate social hygiene. As such, medicine in both military and civilian contexts became central to the efforts of the state to maintain the health and productivity of the population at large.