Histories of medicine and vaccinology routinely reference the Ottoman Empire with regard to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her children's variolation, and the transmission of this knowledge throughout Britain and thereafter Europe. Few, however, follow the empire's ongoing relationship with vaccination after the Montagu family's departure. This article examines this aspect of Ottoman medical history by noting how Jenner's advances diffused back into the empire and then presenting and analyzing how imperial, medical, and even community leaders began to both educationally condition the population and gradually enact legislation that mandated vaccination. Owing to severe infrastructural, personnel, and financial deficits, instability, and popular fears and trepidation, the empire's aspirations to achieve universal vaccination were far from realized by the time of its early 1920s demise-especially throughout largely rural Anatolia. Ottoman institutional, educational, and legislative advances, however, collectively prepared the ground for the succeeding Turkish republic and its public health agenda. Given the republic's promotion of its efforts to modernize Turkey amid its mutual initiatives of nationbuilding, the empire's histories of providing this foundation are also sometimes overlooked.
In its initial years, the nascent Turkish republic established the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance in order to promote public health. Beyond simply facilitating its modernizing agenda for the emergent nation-state as it sought to define itself against an Ottoman past, this institution was also geared toward remedying a self-defined population crisis by prioritizing and confronting particular diseases and health conditions. One of the maladies of utmost concern was syphilis. Based upon an analysis of official primary sources, this article engages with how the developing republic distinguished and consequently politically constructed-or framed-the syphilis problem from the vantage of its new forward capital, Ankara. Integral to this project of confronting this sexually transmitted disease, public health officials projected upon both this ailment and their understanding of the suitable means for its treatment their own views of what constituted appropriate sexual practices and relations. In doing so, certain subgroups of the population, especially prostitutes, were particularized as targets for surveillance and policing through regimes of licensing and compulsory medical examinations. Stemming from the state's framing of the disease-and its definition of appropriate sexual practices-this article also examines the subsequent legislative and public health education projects that followed.
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