Nineteenth century was a period of massive demographic transformation for Ottoman society. The anxiety of depopulation turned many different aspects of female sexuality and reproductive functions into popular political topics. In this period Ottoman medical doctors sought ways to hinder the factors that led to the decrease of its population and initiated policies to promote its further increase. Although the pronatalist policies centred on the question of fertility and fecundity, the issue of infertility and reproductive experiences about it were not directly addressed until the late century. The cases of involuntary childlessness and the reproductive dysfunctions first attracted the attention of medical doctors. The medicalization of infertility constructed this problem as an abnormality and the infertile as a patient to be cured. However, shortly non-medical works on infertility also emerged as part of the debates on population increase, and normative and popular works welcomed this issue as an opportunity to express broader concerns about the anxieties about demography. Besides offering clues about the conceptualization of femininity, the debates on infertility also problematized the male body. As such, books on infertility is one rare field where Ottoman pronatalism targeted male body and the male reproductive experience beside the female ones. The books on infertility hint the early premises of eugenic ideas as conceived by the Ottoman doctors and the intellectuals. In this paper, I will deal with the normative and medical literature on infertility and will discuss the ambivalent representations of infertility and the infertile in the late nineteenth early twentieth century Ottoman society. Through the analysis of the debates on infertility I will also discuss the reconstruction of norms about sexuality and the conceptions of female body within this.

During Turkish modernity, informal midwives who had no formal school education and learned this occupation by knowledge and experience passed onto succeeding generations by women, have been mostly marginalized as “ignorant, dirty, superstitious crones” not only by prominent medical authorities, but also by Ottoman, Turkish or Western intellectuals who wrote on healing practices. Health in general and childbirth in particular were important dimensions of the modernization efforts, during which the medicalization and secularization of childbirth was the overwhelming goal. With the new legislative and education reforms, it was targeted that a new generation of midwives would be grown up under the supervision of doctors, but the young, educated midwives were placed at the lowest level of medical hierarchy without autonomy, whereas informal midwives were banned out of profession with the wide accepted assumption that they were the cause of problems within the birth domain. Moreover, the latter have stayed largely invisible in Ottoman and Turkish studies. In fact, informal midwives were competent not only on child birth, but their activity domain transcended birth and they were healers: in addition to giving advice to women on issues related to reproduction, such as birth control or abortion, they were curing various diseases with herbal medicine, giving birth to animals, washing the body of the deceased, bone setting or performing religious and spiritual activities. This study, incorporating information from archival material, as well as from medical, ethnographical, anthropological and folkloric studies, yet relying mainly on oral history interviews, will start by scrutinizing the image initiated for informal midwives. I will then look at their activities within the birth domain and attempt to answer who, how and why became a midwife, how knowledge of midwifery and healing passed onto next generations, what role and meaning did religion and rituals had before, during and after childbirth, and how women’s perception of pregnancy and birth changed from a healing experience to a solely medical process. After investigating how two main aspects of the moral gain from midwifery and healing, that is “respectability” and “reputation”, mutually effected and fostered each other, empowering them to transcend the gendered boundaries of the public and private spheres, I will strive to unearth the wide activity domain of midwives to understand that not only their medical role, but also their spiritual role exceeds birth domain, and that they are still important channels in carrying the knowledge on healing rituals.

The period between mid- nineteenth to early twentieth century was the time of increasing concern about sexually transmitted diseases and their society-wide flow as epidemics. Syphilis, which is quite often regarded as an “illness of the modern era”, perceived as an evil infirmity that could deteriorate future generations, obliterate fetuses and doom stricken families of different classes to unhealthy, jeopardized and tainted progeny. In addition to these, it was also an immoral malady which could destroy the fighting ability of men in arms and impair the honor of societies in which it broke out. In relation to rapid flow of syphilis among masses, different sets of reflexes and precautions emerged; such as growing concern towards the well-being and purity of families, systematic medical examination of prostitutes and control over prostitution, hospitals designed and built for locking and treating syphilitics in a compulsory way, and a whole set of strictly moral claims about the infected. Ottoman Empire was not an exception. Between 1850s and 1900s, syphilis became a multi-dimensional health disorder for Ottoman administration. Due to its quantitative and qualitative impacts over population, it was perceived as a serious encumbrance for the outfit and might of Ottoman society and state. In the medium of syphilis, repressive means were utilized to discipline different social groups in the empire; such as prostitutes, army conscripts and bachelors by compulsory medical controls and through long-term hospital confinements were among the repressive and disciplinary measures of the Ottoman anti-syphilis regulation. Medical professionals, magistrates of municipal and police administration, and community leaders were also held responsible to detect, record and report the ill. Ottoman advice genre on syphilis also elaborated certain points which were either visited passingly or non present in the scope of anti-syphilis regulations put in force. These works aimed to sustain regulations by providing practical instructions to the target population and agents, who were liable to enforce the preventive measures. They also provided information on the informal dimension of syphilis epidemics since they were written by literary figures who had a critical outlook, and area specialists who reported the reactions to, and the impact of the regulations in force. This paper will try to critically analyze these dimensions of anti-syphilis regulation in the late Ottoman Empire in order to portray the representations of the syphilitic and the syphilis as an illness as well as arguing the gendered nature of medical discourses over venereal disease.