This paper explores the making of modern medical knowledge and practice in the late Ottoman Empire by focusing on the role of the Bakteriolojihane-i Hümayun (Royal Bacteriology Institute) which was established in 1894 as part of a broader scientific and diplomatic effort to control the devastating impact of the 1892 cholera epidemic in Istanbul. Maurice Nicolle, who was in charge of microbiology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, served as the head of the Bakteriolojihane until his resignation in 1901. Literature on the Bakteriolojihane focuses on Nicolle’s tough personality and conflictual relationships with those in the political and medical circles. Decentering the emphasis on Nicolle’s persona, this paper analyzes imperial and local dynamics that formed medical education as well as knowledge production and practices that took place in the Bakteriolojihane. The establishment of the Bakteriolojihane overlapped with a particular historical context highlighted by the intensification of scientific competition between followers of Pasteur and those of Koch over the dissemination of research and methods on bacteriology. This paper examines the Bakteriolojihane and the world around it by locating the institute in this competitive framework and addressing questions regarding the relationship between the nature of sovereignty and the production of scientific knowledge in the late Ottoman context. While it had been a common practice among the medical-bureaucratic circles in the Ottoman Empire to invite European medical experts as advisers, the Bakteriolojihane constituted the first institutional example of such practices in this historical context. I will explore the notion of “colonial medicine” by looking at the interplay between medical knowledge and practices in the Bakteriolojihane at a time of scientific colonial competition. Medical institutions like the Bakteriolojihane also functioned as schools to educate medical personnel who later played significant roles in the medical-bureaucratic positions. The number of medical students who visited schools and hospitals in Europe, predominantly in France, for advanced study increased sharply after the establishment of the Bakteriolojihane. By focusing on the experiences of these medical experts in multiple contexts, this paper addresses questions concerning the political identities, social perceptions and medical expertise of these physicians in the framework of their encounter with the European medical setting as well as the ways in which they translated their experiences into domestic conditions, especially in the Anatolian countryside, as they became policy makers and medical practitioners.

Disease lends itself to laboratory tales of heroism, which often mean stories of men and Europe. This dynamic has perhaps been especially true for the treatment of rabies, the fearsome ill that allegedly spawned tales of werewolves and vampires alike. This paper will indulge neither great-man history nor supernatural creature history. Instead, the paper will explore the social and environmental history of rabies in the late Ottoman Empire, a story situated in between common men, women, and creatures. Beginning in the 1890s the Ottoman state initiated a partnership with the Institut Pasteur and commenced to produce rabies vaccines. But curing the Well-Protected Domains of the malady spread by mad-dog bites was a matter of far more than production of medicine. Since for many years the only vaccines were available in Istanbul, treatment also involved the transportation at state expense of Ottoman citizens from far-flung portions of the Empire often via rail to the capital for month-long convalescences. A representative case took place in 1905 when a rabid dog bit a worker on the Hijaz Railway. While the Ottomans constructed the transportation network to ease the flow of pilgrims to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, treatment of the worker necessitated an imperial pilgrimage of sorts, sending the man from the iron of rails and grains of sand in the Hijaz to the Üsküdar Rabies hospital. Thus, the story of rabies entails a complicated set of relationships between humans, animals, and the built environment, all of them managed to varying degrees of success by the Ottoman state. This paper will illuminate these linkages by mining records kept of these cases by the Zaptiye (security forces) in two enormous defters at the Basbakanlik archive in Istanbul. Inquiring about the experiences of the humans and animals within this context, the paper will show how state and science interacted dialectically to reshape citizens’ relationships with their own bodies, the Ottoman state, and the environment more broadly. In doing so, the paper brings literature on the history of science and environmental history to bear on recent revisionist work on the late Ottoman Empire, firmly placing movement of people, ideas, and commodities at the center of the history of the Empire’s final years and the post-Ottoman polities of the region.

This paper explores approaches to malaria during the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire and later in Republican Turkey. Because disease management entails the control of people and their lived environments, solutions to malaria affected Ottoman subjects directly and were inextricable from other political and economic concerns. As treatments for malaria shifted their focus from bad air to bad mosquitoes to bad peasants, Ottoman and Turkish citizens were thrust into the role of infantry in an ostensive battle between nature and nation. For most of the Ottoman period, malaria was understood through its symptoms, namely recurring fevers during the late summer and fall months in warm, wet regions. This ailment was attributed to the bad air or climate of humid areas such as swamps. The most common response was avoidance of such geographies during those months, resulting in the emergence of seasonal migration among pastoral and urban populations alike. However, during the nineteenth century, increased pressure to settle seasonally migratory pastoralist communities identified as a?air meant that this solution was no longer tolerable from a state perspective. The focus of this paper is on efforts to make malarial regions more habitable through drainage efforts that arise in the public works records of the Ottoman archives. Cultivation of these lands was to make them more productive, enrich the empire, and provide space for the settlement of nomads and immigrants fleeing the Russian sphere. Within the understandings of disease from the period, these efforts were cast as cleansing of polluted environments through drainage and planting healthful vegetation such as eucalyptus. However, economic and political objectives were prioritized over health, and I argue that the expansion of frontier-type settlement through the cultivation of new lands by resettled populations resulted in the creation of malaria issues as opposed to their elimination, which in turn undermined many aspects of Tanzimat-era government agendas. Yet, this is not to say that Ottoman medical professionals and statesmen were not concerned with public health. This paper also considers measures taken towards fighting malaria, particularly after scientific advances marked the malaria parasite and its vector the anopheles mosquito as the central culprits, leading to medical and mosquito-focused approaches. During this period as in the past, the improper practices of rural folks and their ecological habits remained a central target. In this way, as scientific approaches to malaria began to change, the constant of the supremacy of scientific knowledge was maintained.