This paper explores the genre of Ottoman plague treatises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with a view to tracing the changes in the learned elite's medical knowledge concerning this disease. Clearly prompted by the increasing prominence of plague in Ottoman lands, these treatises tried systematically to present, analyze, and synthesize the available knowledge. So far largely discredited or ignored as a body of genre and indeed consisting almost entirely of unpublished manuscripts, Ottoman plague treatises constitute an immense body of literature and are an invaluable source for the student of the plague. Written by the leading Ottoman intellectuals-jurists, physicians, historians, and scholars-- these tracts were not simply copies of each other, but reflected dramatic changes in medical conceptual schemes, the implementation of new methods, and integration of new empirical observations into such schemes by means of such methods. Through an analysis of prominent examples of the genre, the paper will demonstrate that these treatises differed dramatically from the earlier works composed in the Islamic world during and immediately after the Black Death. Contrary to what is commonly held in the contemporary scholarship, these works reflect a clear recognition of notions of contagion. These ideas, which were circulating in the early modern Mediterranean world found their way to the Ottoman medical literature, around the same time as Renaissance scholars in Italian city-states developed similar perspectives. Furthermore, the paper will also show how these new notions of contagion gained prominence against other competing medical and non-medical explanations on the spread of this disease. Finally, it will stress the significance of the swift acceptance of these notions by the medical elite and how they were gradually harmonized and made compatible with the tenets of Islamic law, which, in respect of plague, became the basis for legal policies of the early modern Ottoman state in the late sixteenth century.

In 1648, the Ottoman polymath and scholar Katip Celebi sought to compile a massive geographical work called the Cihannuma, encompassing all of the known world. However, he abandoned his initial draft of the manuscript after he realized the degree to which his Ottoman contemporaries had fallen behind in the study of geography. With the help of bi-lingual contemporaries who assisted him in acquiring and translating geographical works from European sources such as Dutch atlases and Spanish treatises on the western hemisphere, Katip Celebi began a second draft of the manuscript in 1654. He incorporated this new material into a well-established tradition of Muslim geographical literature dating back to the formative period of Islamic history. However, Katip Celebi's scholarly career was often diverted into other projects aimed at meeting the pressing needs of an Ottoman state beset by mid-seventeenth-century political and economic crisis. This chaotic environment, followed by his sudden and untimely death at the age of 47, kept him from completing the work. The manuscript draft was later refined and edited by the noted Ottoman printer Ibrahim Muteferrika and re-issued as one of the first printed books in the Ottoman Empire after 1720. However, the work has remained largely untapped as a source until fairly recently. This paper aims to analyze what types of information Katip Celebi sought to integrate into the Cihannuma for his Ottoman audience, with a particular emphasis on the parts of the world about which the Ottomans had little prior knowledge. One of the issues that Katip Celebi deemed important for this work was to record the nature and types of medical remedies and other useful substances found in these newly-discovered regions. This paper will highlight the role of pharmaceutical substances as they emerged in the trade networks of the early modern world by surveying the chapters in the Cihannuma that deal with the Americas and parts of the Far East such as the Spice Islands, China, Japan and others. Furthermore, it will identify what a prominent Ottoman figure thought was critical for the advancement of his society in a era of great instability. Finally, we will acquire important insights about the process of knowledge transmission between early modern European sources and Muslim Ottomans in the period before the full integration of the Ottoman Empire into an increasingly globalizing world.

This paper explores the construction of bubonic plague as a specific illness during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by comparing contemporary accounts of two episodes of mass mortality, in Marseilles and Aleppo (present-day Syria). The hypothesis of external disease agents to be classed together like birds or fish bore with it a corollary: the generic human body. Because people were taxonomically 'equal,' recognizably distinct illnesses could be produced in any individual notwithstanding his or her idiosyncratic balance of humors. These linked ideas were hotly debated between those who promoted contagionist ideas and those (both in Europe and the Levant) who rejected them. The official rationale for European quarantines was an identification of Middle Eastern cities with the bubonic plague, the inevitable outcome of particular beliefs and behaviors. However, examination of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources suggests instead that on both sides of the Mediterranean, divergent attitudes toward quarantine were motivated by a struggle for power in the international marketplace and political arena. Diagnoses of 'bubonic plague' in this period were an inversion of contemporary arguments for equality within European nation-states. Individuals and communities that showed "marks of contagion" on their physical or social bodies were denied the protection of rights increasingly thought to accrue to all states and human beings equally. The quarantine institutions that diagnosed and claimed to control plague thus provided boundaries for human rights on the one hand, and the 'family of nations' on the other. Descriptions of plague by laypersons and medical literati, including both 'contagionists' like Jean-Baptiste Bertrand and 'localists' like Salih bin Nasrallah Ibn Sallum and Francois Chicoyneau, make clear that all parties, both professional and lay, depended on common theoretical principles outlined in Graeco-Arabic medical and natural historical sources. The residents of Europe and Ottoman Syria differed not in their medical knowledge but rather in administrative systems that called familiar diseases of development by different names. Apparent differential incidence of plague, I suggest in conclusion, may be an illusion of our documentary sources, as common bodily signs appearing on individuals in widely dispersed locations were associated with each other by a complex documentary chain.

Epidemic Disease, Quarantines, and Migration Management in the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1830s Increased trade and human connections in the post-Kü?k Kaynarca period made the Ottoman-Russian Black Sea frontier a particularly active zone for the outbreak and spread of disease in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many Ottoman subjects flight (for safety and to escape social ostracism) was the natural response to the appearance and contraction of disease. This displacement disrupted the collection of taxes, hampered the recruitment of soldiers, and contributed to lawlessness and a breakdown in public order. As conventionally understood, comprehensive sanitation, anti-disease, and quarantine measures were introduced in the Ottoman Empire in the late 1830s. In this narrative, the Ottoman Empire, under pressure from the west and as part of the Tanzimat modernizing projects undertaken by Sultan Mahmud II, called upon European experts to provide technical assistance and guidance in drafting rules and regulations for the implementation and administration of a quarantine system. While a central part of any history of Ottoman quarantines, a focus on European contributions in the late 1830s shortchanges a long history of the Ottoman state's domestic anti-disease initiatives and overlooks the important and forward-looking anti-disease measures undertaken during the reign of Sultan Selim III (1789-1807). Ottoman quarantine stations evolved into all purpose border posts and were utilized to manage affairs beyond that of merely checking the spread of disease. Customs houses were commandeered and converted into quarantine stations and customs collectors were re-appointed as quarantine officials. The linkage, in the mind of Ottoman officials, between migration and the spread of disease resulted in the introduction - in the first half of the nineteenth century - of multiple layers of travel and identity documentation requirements for all individuals entering and exiting the Ottoman Empire. Underscoring the role of quarantines as all-purpose border posts, Ottoman quarantine officials were authorized to issue travel documentation to individual travelers including the mtrur tezkiresi, yol emri and yol h kom. These types of activities indicate an increased interest by the Ottoman state in the early nineteenth century in controlling population movements and "knowing" which subjects were on the move both within and without the empire.

'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.