Pinel of Istanbul: Dr. Luigi Mongeri (1815-1882) and the Emergence of Modern Psychiatry in Ottoman Empire It was not until the eighteenth century that psychiatry began to emerge and came to be defined as a medical discipline. The most prominent figure in the history of psychiatry is Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) who removed the chains from patients and put “moral treatment” into the scene. Moral treatment and non-restraint movement spread to all Europe during the nineteenth century and shaped the essentials of modern psychiatry. The pioneer of modern psychiatry in the Ottoman Empire was Dr. Luigi Mongeri, (1815-1882) an Italian physician/alienist who was called “Pinel of Istanbul” or “Pinel of the Turks”. Dr. Luigi Mongeri was born in Milano. After receiving a degree from the faculty of Medicine in Pavia, he remained in the faculty for a short period and moved to Istanbul in 1839. Dr. Mongeri worked in different cities at Anatolia and Crete until 1856 when he was appointed as a chief physician to Suleymaniye Bimarhanesi, the central lunatic asylum of Istanbul, the Ottoman capital in the nineteenth century. The first attempts to institutionalize psychiatry took place in this asylum; however, the greater transformation and practices occurred after mentally ill patients were transferred from Suleymaniye to Toptaşı Asylum at the end of 1873. Dr. Luigi Mongeri, who became the administrative chief of the Toptaşı Asylum, declared the Bimarhaneler Nizamnamesi (The Regulations on Asylums) in 1876. It was the first Law of Lunacy that included detailed regulations about the administration of asylums and insanity in the Ottoman Empire. Dr. Mongeri was also the first physician in modern Turkey, who published articles about modern psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, mental illnesses, psychiatric cases, conditions in asylums and public health issues. Focusing on the biography of Mongeri, this paper aims to discuss Dr. Mongeri’s reform attempts to institutionalize modern psychiatry in Turkey and their consequences.

The two decades following the establishment of the Republic witnessed the growth of the pervasive fear that the vagrant and homeless children and child delinquents presented a threat to the physical, mental and economic wellbeing of the Turkish nation. Newspapers of the period regularly touched upon the issue, alerting the public and the State officials to the increase in the number of vagrant and homeless children in the streets of Istanbul, and in crime and other troubles caused by these “little miserable” (küçük sefiller). The language of these newspaper articles was an amalgam of humanitarian sentiments such as showing charity and mercy to these groups and fears that necessitated their social and moral control so that they become productive citizens of the new Republic. In this paper, I trace how Mental Hygiene Society (Türkiye Akıl Hıfzıssıhhası Cemiyeti), founded in 1930, responded to the “problem” of the vagrant and homeless children and child delinquents. Mental hygiene movement was one of the most organized movements that systematically worked toward bettering and reforming the bodies/conditions of these children. I first analyze how mental hygienists conceptualized “problem child” population in a new biomedical and economic discourse and then explore the institutional and legislative initiatives, particularly two institutions: Çocuk Islah Evi (1937) and Çocukları Kurtarma Yurdu (1933). I see both discursive and non-discursive efforts to control and regulate these populations as a part of the biopolitical practices in the first three decades of the Republic. I argue that what mental hygienists saw when they gazed at the body of the problem child was not the same child seen by a sociologist, a moralist, or a pedagogue. The child in this gaze was “little sick” whose condition was an effect of his/her pathological nature and an effect of the milieu. This conceptualization, ignored by most scholars analyzing the political and cultural discourse of Kemalist regime, was integral to how medical doctors at large and mental hygienists in particular perceived national problems –social, moral or political. Their scientific discourse of pathological childhood was inseparable from how they conceived the health and well being of the nation itself. Methodologically grounded in history of present, this analysis aims bring into view a way of thinking about the “pathological” and “normal” as invented through multiple different discursive and non-discursive practices.