Established in May 1920—almost three and one-half years prior to the Ottoman Empire’s eventual collapse in October 1923, the nascent Turkish republic’s Ministry of Health and Social Assistance articulated public health concerns that were shared by many modern states of the era. In seeking to address these concerns, the ministry and state officials established a bureaucracy and ambitious agenda for combating public health problems and promoting policies of pronatalism. In particular, one of the first projects of the ministry entailed shifting the “clinical gaze” of the country’s physicians from a focus on the body of the patient to the body of the nation. Creating an informational basis for this medicalized framing of its populace, the ministry initiated comprehensive surveys of both its lands and its peoples. In this paper, I present an analysis of volumes from “The Medical-Social Geography of Turkey” and data from other primary sources that reveal the ways in which the republic’s officials prioritized the aggregation of data about territories, populace, and public health. In doing so, I reveal how Turkey’s early leaders and physicians not only sought to establish governance through public health but also actively employed notions of geography and its application as a tool of statecraft to achieve their medical and political ends.

“The Transformation in Health,” Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) massive project of healthcare restructuring was launched in 2004, and has been subject to intense discussions since then. But the discussions took a new twist in 2012 with the onset of a new data centralization program. Partly because its implementation followed a heated debate about abortion and c-sections, the program was met with scepticism by many: doctors, lawyers, and patients seeking care voiced their concerns about the program; certain groups started to organise to stop its implementation; yet other groups and individuals brought their cases to the courts. At the heart of the concerns of all these groups lay their fears about patient’s right to privacy. While idea of individual rights came about first as a protection mechanism against an over-intrusive state apparatus, recent scholarship on rights suggests that delineating the ways in which certain rights are conceived and practiced in a given context is crucial to understand both macro- and micro power dynamics in that society. On the one hand, although rights claims are presented as universal, the study of rights as practices shows that social inequalities are ingrained within rights. Attending to the ways that a certain right is conceptualized therefore allows a grasp of these power relations. On the other hand, rights claiming may or may not empower the groups who perform it, and context-specific research is necessary to understand why, how, and when rights claiming, as a strategy, ‘works.’ This paper will examine the development of the idea of the rights of the patient, and especially the right to privacy, in Turkey. Although the idea of the rights of the patient has not been introduced for the first time to Turkey with this struggle over the centralization of patient records, it has become both more widespread within society and more central in discussions about healthcare through this process. But what does this newly popularized right involve? How is privacy conceptualized as a right by the claimants? Who is considered to be qualified to ‘have’ this right, and who is not? That is, who is the subject of the right to privacy? Through interviews conducted with doctors, lawyers, and patient’s rights activists, this paper will scrutinise the premises of prospects of the patient’s right to privacy advocacy in Turkey.

In this paper, I trace the emergence of biopolitics in the first three decades of the Turkish Republic (1920s to 1950s) through an analysis of the mental hygiene and IQ (intelligence quotient) discourse. I seek to demonstrate how these two discourses permeated the social and educational reforms of the nascent Republic, constructing new categories and scientific objects while demarcating new boarders for sociality, subjectivity, and citizenship. While these two discourses appeared in two separate scientific fields, psychiatry and pedagogy respectively, they coalesced in their objectification of the mind and the intellect as a part of the broader population question (nüfus meselesi). The former aimed at formulating principles for organizing the mind and disciplining the intellect as a precursor to a well-organized conduct while the latter sought to apply the quasi-scientific principles drawn from the studies done on human brain in school settings, in classification of school children, and organization of educational experience at large. The overall purpose was to fabricate healthier citizens. I begin with describing the establishment of Türkiye Hijyen Mental Cemiyeti (Mental hygiene Society) by the leading psychiatrist Fahreddin Kerim Gökay, and the activities of the Institute of Pedagogy of Istanbul University. My concern is how the bio-medical and psychosocial policies, practices and discourses were made possible through a combination of conditions being present simultaneously, particularly those pertaining to the economic, social and cultural anxieties of the new Republic. These were: the fear of population decline, and the preoccupations with economic productivity of the body that blended into the fears of ethnic degeneration, and social diseases and pathologies of all sort (prostitutes, alcoholics, syphilitics, the feebleminded etc.). I use a wide range of archival data to construct the narrative including: visual materials, brochures and similar propaganda pamphlets produced and distributed by the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (now Ministry of Health) and the Ministry of National Education, scientific and quasi-scientific publications produced by the Department of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Pedagogy of Istanbul University on mental and social hygiene, biographies and autobiographies of the scientists and political actors in the designated time period, and popular and scientific journals. Methodologically grounded in what is called history of present, the analysis in this paper aims bring into view a way of thinking about the social and individual body as “invented” through multiple different historical practices.

By examining early 1920s documents from the nascent Turkish republic and its Ankara-based Grand National Assembly, we witness that one of the first regulatory concerns to emerge involved proposals to prohibit alcohol. As with contemporary prohibition politics observable in the United States, wherein particular religiously-based groups and organizations linking women’s rights with temperance oddly aligned themselves with racist and xenophobic interests, the nascent Turkish republic’s politics of drink brought together seemingly incongruent actor and groups, as well. While core interests advocating prohibition in 1920s Turkey were religionists—and their stance as Islamists on prohibition largely prefigured their later posture vis-à-vis particular secularist interests over matters like the eventual abolition of the Caliphate, their position was supported oddly by the early republic’s very secular public health establishment. Moreover, without the support of those concerned more with medicine than morality, the early parliament would not have been able to enact a brief period of prohibition in Anatolia. In this paper, I examine the medicalized discourse found in Turkey’s earliest debates regarding prohibition. This narrative not only underscores early leaders’ concerns over population and health as they sought to achieve governance, it also reveals a sociopolitical issue that has always been far more nuanced than simplistic dualisms, as depicted between Islamists and secularists. In presenting this paper, I also engage with how this history of health and alcohol better contextualizes our understandings of current protests over today’s Turkish state wherein the place of drink and drinking are again contested.

Nowadays Turkey is going through a different type of war; a struggle that incorporates all citizens as potential warriors, the war against obesity and the war against smoking. Turkish nation’s one of the biggest source of entertainment, Turkish soap operas are being interrupted on a regular basis by the state advertisements and or warnings. It is safe to claim that it is impossible to watch television uninterrupted by the state in Turkey. Turkish TVs and radios keep playing ‘public ads’, either warning on obesity, advertising for the hotline to stop smoking, how to calculate your body mass index, importance of mother’s milk for babies etc. These public ‘advertisement’s are not limited to health issues, raising awareness about traffic accidents, how to protect environment and other various issues keep coming to the attention of Turkish audience. However, the ones that aim on protecting the health of citizens occupy the major lot. Moreover it is novel in Turkish context. Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been transforming the state and its established ideology since coming to power in 2002. However, one thing is clear, to the dismay of liberal expectations, there is an empowering state in the Turkish case. And this state is more and more interested in the health and well being of ordinary citizen. Indeed, this strengthened state employs a combination of illiberal and liberal practices in conducting the conduct of its citizens. In this context, this paper aims to unpack the reasons and methods of this increasing interest in health and well being of Turkish citizens by bringing together two parallel and unrelated dynamics: bio-politics and Islam. The article will first provide a background on the public health policies of AKP in the last decade, which has been one of the major sources of support as well as controversy for AKP governments. Then it will bring in discussions on bio-politics, that highlight the increasing link between the life and politics in advanced liberalism and discuss if Turkish case is an example of it. It will be argued that part of it is linked to a liberalizing process of Turkish politics linked to Europeanization in public health policies, whereas the rest is related to the concomitant rise of conservatism framed in an Islamic mind-set of the ruling elite.