The role of Ottoman apothecaries and their products changed dramatically in the course of the 19th century due to changes in science and technology, newly available products at an ever-accelerating pace in a new global market for pharmaceuticals and their raw ingredients, professionalization including the founding of the Ottoman Imperial School of Medicine and its affiliated institutions, and a changing legal climate of regulation of trade and of legal and illegal drugs in particular within the empire. This paper traces some of these changes through three sources: the serial press, the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul, and holdings in American archives related to pharmaceutical training, production, and export. Through an analysis of feature articles and advertisements, I will present the changing discourse around the meanings of esrar or drugs both in pharmacology and in home remedies, as the household became a site for strengthening and maintaining the health of the Ottoman population. I will trace the professionalization of pharmacology through the serial press, through regulations of apothecary shops in the Prime Ministry Archives, and through correspondence of John Uri Lloyd, an American pharmacist, novelist, and businessman, with Ahmad Ramsey and Sherif Pasha of Izmir between 1906 and 1911, leading up to and following a visit by Lloyd to the Ottoman Empire for business and pleasure in 1906. Running throughout the paper is an analysis of professionalization of pharmacology and pharmaceutical practices in France from the 17th century forwards, drawing on another set of papers in the Lloyd Library’s holdings. As the paper moves forward in time, I will bring these two narratives together in a discussion of Ottoman responses to internal needs and external pressures, as reformers, pharmacists, merchants, and consumers took up opportunities of intellectual and economic exchange to alter understandings and practices of drugs in the Ottoman Empire.

In the 19th century, the planting and distribution of cannabis was under control of the Ottoman government. The word used for cannabis, esrar, is an Arabic word literally meaning “secrets.” According to correspondence among the offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Hariciye Nezareti), it seems that the Ottoman government was closely following international procedures, particularly of France, Russia, England, Spain, Germany, and Italy, and their laws regarding cannabis agriculture. While there is no indication that the Ottoman government directly modeled themselves after European laws regarding the planting and consumption of cannabis, they were at least used as justification for Ottoman laws. Archival documents indicate that the Ottoman government attempted to regulate the planting and distribution of cannabis. On the other hand, smoking cannabis was a widespread habit not only in Ottoman coffeehouses but also in prisons. This paper aims to examine the distribution and consumption of cannabis in Ottoman prisons at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, including how prisoners obtained cannabis behind prison walls, who acted as cannabis dealers or mediators in Ottoman prisons, and to what degree the Ottoman government could respond to and control trafficking. Based on archival sources from the Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, it appears that policemen and prison guards were involved in this trafficking. By exploring the long journey of cannabis from plantations through the Ottoman prisons, this paper will argue that Ottoman prisons were institutions representative of an Ottoman governing mentality and also serve as an illustrative example of the time lag between the writing of new legal codes and their actual implementation. Although the Council of State (?ura-y? Devlet) had prohibited the cultivation of cannabis in 1889, and also had warned the local governors (vali) to take precautions against its consumption and sales, neither the penal codes nor policemen able to stop the cultivation and the use of cannabis. While the literal meaning of esrar was “secrets” it seems at least some of the Ottoman officers were not ignorant of the usage of cannabis in prisons.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman government enacted various regulations to control the circulation and sale of poison in the Empire. Further, with the 1858 Penal Code, imprisonment and pecuniary punishment were introduced for the first time for vendors who sold poison without a guarantee from a third person. The aim of this effort to regulate poison sale was to prevent criminal poisonings along with other accidental poisonings caused by medical malpractices. However, as archival evidence reveals, there were certain obstacles that would hinder these efforts. Poison, especially arsenic and corrosive sublimate, had a vast range of applications and found many legitimate uses in daily life which is why poison continued to be available in demand in spite of the incessant precautions introduced in the field. Moreover, it seems that the laws and regulations enacted by the central government were far out of reach in the countryside. Throughout the period under research, poison murder and poisoning deaths because of malpractices by the pharmacists, unlicensed physicians, and lay healers received remarkable amount of attention by the government. This paper aims to explore the Ottoman government’s interventions to the business of poison sale by closely examining the legal records, especially the interrogation reports, based on a research in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives in ?stanbul. In an era of legal, economic, and administrative reforms, I argue, poison murder and accidental poisonings posed a serious challenge to the central government’s attempts for regulation and surveillance over its population. These cases, of course, do not only reveal the legal and institutional dimension of regulation on the poison issue, but also yield a complex narrative about the social and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire, such as the availability of poisons, patterns of marital conflict, the coping strategies with domestic violence, and attitudes toward women. By drawing on examples especially from the Rumelian and Anatolian countryside and utilizing particularly the interrogation reports of the murderers and the poison vendors, I will examine why poison murder started to pose a threat to the government’s efforts to diffuse its power in the countryside, while demonstrating, at the same time, the counter-effect of the local dynamics in this process. As an unaddressed question in the understudied social history of the Tanzimat period, this discussion may contribute to our understanding of the social life in the late Ottoman Empire.