Our working group, previously titled “History of Infectious Disease in the Islamicate World (HIDIW),” was originally conceived in 2020 in the context of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic with a view to making an “emergency intervention” to jump start the developing field of epidemiological history by bringing together various experts working in the fields of history of medicine and medieval Islamic studies, and preparing a cluster of working translations of key texts relating to the experience of infectious disease history in the Middle East and North Africa. With this in mind, we hosted our regular monthly meetings, which took place from February 2021 to June 2023. During this time, we hosted a total of 22 meetings (with 24 different presenters) where speakers introduced new primary sources and presented their ongoing research projects.
Where we stand today, that immediate goal for an “emergency intervention” in the context of the pandemic is no longer directly relevant. After taking a hiatus year, our newly revamped working group, now titled “History of Death and Disease in the Islamicate World (HIDDIW),” thus expands its focus to include a broader array of topics. In its new configuration, the working group will serve as a platform for multidisciplinary discussions on the history of death, disease, public health, and healing in the Islamicate World by a host of speakers from disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and paleosciences.
Participants at Consortium activities will treat each other with respect and consideration to create a collegial, inclusive, and professional environment that is free from any form of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation.
Participants will avoid any inappropriate actions or statements based on individual characteristics such as age, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, nationality, political affiliation, ability status, educational background, or any other characteristic protected by law. Disruptive or harassing behavior of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment includes but is not limited to inappropriate or intimidating behavior and language, unwelcome jokes or comments, unwanted touching or attention, offensive images, photography without permission, and stalking.
Participants may send reports or concerns about violations of this policy to conduct@chstm.org.
Past Meetings
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The Precarious City: New Regimes of Death and Disease in Early Modern Istanbul (Nukhet Varlik)
My research traces the emergence and evolution of Ottoman healthscaping efforts and their broader political implications. I examine how the Ottoman central administration developed a range of legal and institutional measures to make cities, particularly Istanbul, safer, cleaner, and more livable during the early modern period. These efforts reveal the deep entanglement of public health and sovereignty, as managing disease and mortality became a means of asserting state authority. I further explore how healthscaping expanded the empire’s biopolitical and necropolitical power over its subjects—both living and dead—ultimately playing a key role in the process of Ottoman state formation.
In this talk, I will focus on the shifting regimes of death and disease in Istanbul during the first centuries of Ottoman rule. As the city grew, its inhabitants encountered new and intensified threats to health, in addition to longstanding afflictions. Old diseases like plague continued alongside newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, such as syphilis and smallpox that grew more virulent over time. Urban disasters—fires, earthquakes, and floods—claimed lives on an unprecedented scale, while construction, shipping, and new technologies introduced novel risks of injury and death. The growing use of firearms brought new forms of violence, and warfare continued to shape patterns of mortality through battlefield injuries and camp-borne infections. New substances imported from the New World infiltrated the city’s markets leading to new health problems. The perils of urban life reshaped experiences of illness and death, prompting responses from the central administration, medical practitioners, and the urban population of the city. This talk explores the strategies devised to confront these challenges, shedding light on the evolving relationship between governance, medical knowledge, and the management of life and death in an early modern imperial capital.
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Archaeothanatology: A method for determining mortuary practices in ancient societies (In Turkish) (Yasemin Yılmaz)
Death is one of the oldest problems humanity has sought to solve. The burial of the dead is among the important solutions developed in response to this issue. Archaeology is a field of science that aims to reconstruct ancient societies through their remains. Graves and the accompanying rituals provide data about how societies form shared or distinct cultural practices. At the same time, human skeletons—direct representatives of the 'subjects' who founded those societies—play a key role in understanding the biological structure, demographics, dietary habits, diseases that left traces on bones, epidemics, genetic relationships, and migrations of people who lived in the past. Studies on skeletons also yield important results in determining past social inequalities, the phenomenon of violence, and the social positions of women, men, and non-adult individuals. Accessing all this information requires specialized, systematic work methods for graves—methods that prioritize integration of knowledge over fragmentation. The excavation and removal of graves unearthed during archaeological digs, their analysis through multiple analytical systems, and the effort to build a path from the individual to society require a specific method: archaeothanatology. This presentation will discuss the scope of this method and its potential to illuminate the past, based on the data obtained through comprehensive studies at every stage—from fieldwork to analysis—on single primary burials, multiple burials, disturbed graves, possibly unburied individuals, synchronous and diachronic mass graves, and cremations.
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Children’s Health in Late Ottoman Medical Literature: The Fragility of Bodies Prone to Tuberculosis
Ceren Gülser İlikan Rasimoğlu
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Ottoman Empire increasingly recognized tuberculosis as a major threat to public health, prompting efforts to control its spread in public places and households. During this time, before effective treatments or vaccines were available, public health campaigns played a indispensable role in raising awareness on hygiene. Prominent physicians contributed to these efforts by producing not only scientific works but also publications for the health education of the general public. This presentation examines early 20th-century medical advice literature produced by physicians, focusing on how it addressed tuberculosis and stressing its impact on children’s health. It explores how child health education, often directed at parents, became a tool for promoting modern medical practices and hygiene as civic responsibilities, while also reflecting broader public health strategies and pronatalist policies. The analysis highlights the role of physicians in shaping early initiatives to protect child health within its historical context.
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TBA
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TBA
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TBA
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Ali Metin Büyükkarakaya - Death and Disease from Bioarcheological Perspective (in Turkish)
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--POSTPONED--
Seçil Yılmaz, ‘A Living Laboratory: Making Medicine Global in the Late Ottoman Empire’.
Abstract: A Living Laboratory: Making Medicine Global in the Late Ottoman Empire
In the late Ottoman Empire, ideas and practices about medicine, disease, and public health were developed, translated, and circulated among various actors whose motivations as well as competing interests were shaped within a globalizing scientific world. Ottoman physicians were active participants in Europe's burgeoning global medical networks through imperial-sponsored education and their interaction (as well as encounter) with European physicians within shared medical circles in the Ottoman realm. Attitudes regarding the function and implications of scientific knowledge production reflected political and cultural expectations regarding science and medicine. Hence, the Ottomans' incentive to join the ranks of the medical and scientific experts was more than just a means of “westernization” in order to compete with their European counterparts. Rather, the making of scientific and medical knowledge was a political and moral process that incorporated and shaped the political interests of the Ottoman ruling elite. In a similar spirit, European scientists continued to take part in the Ottoman medical world as instructors, inspectors, and policy makers. The work of science and medicine in the Ottoman realm provided ample ground for European scientists to differentiate their work from their European counterparts by utilizing a vast geography and life on it like “a living laboratory.” Between the search for practical solutions for prevailing fundamental problems such as contagious disease and attempts to make an evident mark within Western scientific competition, Ottoman medical circles exhibited a rather hybrid character in which all the actors contributed distinctive political and social agendas and desires to the making of scientific and medical practices in the late Ottoman period.
Biography
Seçil Yılmaz is an Assistant Professor of History and Core Faculty in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Yılmaz specializes in the social and political history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East with a focus on medicine, science, and sexuality. Her research concentrates on the social and political implications of venereal disease in the late Ottoman Empire by tracing the questions of colonialism, modern governance, biopolitics, and sexuality. Her other projects include research on the relationship between religion, history of emotions, and contagious diseases in the late Ottoman Empire as well as history of reproductive health technologies and humanitarianism in the modern Middle East. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Biopolitical Empire: Syphilis, Medicine, and Sex in the Late Ottoman World. Yilmaz is the recipient of the Middle East Studies Association’s Malcom H. Kerr Best Dissertation Award. Her publications have appeared in the journals including Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and in edited collections such as The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism. She is the co-curator of the podcast series on Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World at Ottoman History Podcast.
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"Disease and Death in Early 19th Century Istanbul as Recorded in Ottoman Death Registers" Gülhan Balsoy & Cihangir Gündoğdu (Istanbul Bilgi University)
In the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire established a state-sponsored system for inspecting and registering the deceased. For the first time, medical professionals known as tabib were employed to investigate the causes of death within the city limits of Istanbul. This initial surveillance effort, conducted in 1838–39, resulted in the creation of the city’s first two death registers, which documented a total of 9,500 individual cases. In this presentation, we will explore the surveillance of death and disease in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. By examining the disease category, we aim to further discuss the causes of death and their connections with gender, age, ethnicity, profession, and location.
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"Collective Fears, Uncertainties and Distrust: Biopolitics and Infodemics during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Turkey." Ayşecan Terzioğlu, Sabancı University (Istanbul)
In the Anthropocene, marked by disasters and diseases, the historical reservoir of images, metaphors and discourses, which were used to describe the sick and stricken, are often revisited by the societies and states. The old patterns of marginalization and stigmatization against the “other”, inform the new ones both in social discourses and states’ policies, causing “infodemics”, considered as dangerous as the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization. Turkey is one of the worst-hit countries by the pandemic and the infodemics, which includes conspiracy theories and distrust against the political and medical authorities, as well as marginalization and stigmatization. Based on an extensive media analysis and a survey on the most common infodemic statements during the pandemic, this talk explores the social and demographic factors shaping the infodemics in Turkey, such as gender, age, political opinions and religious beliefs. Using the theoretical frameworks in Foucault’s biopolitics and Baudrillard’s simulacra, it will suggest more effective ways of addressing lay people’s collective fears and uncertainties in order to implement more inclusive health policies.
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*NOTE SPECIAL DATE*
"History of Death and Disease in Anatolia: New Discussions, New Directions." SHIFA-ANA Project Team (Zeynep Akçakaya, Akarsu Melike Demirkol, Tunahan Durmaz, Nükhet Varlık)
This inaugural meeting will be an introduction of the brand-new project SHIFA-ANA: Healing Histories of Death and Disease in Anatolia by the team members. SHIFA-ANA is an interdisciplinary research and public history initiative dedicated to the study of death, disease, and healing in Anatolia’s longue durée history. By using a unique methodology, we explore the intersecting histories of Anatolian lives in biological, environmental, and cultural context. The project will help flesh out forgotten stories of ordinary historical actors (human and nonhuman), how they endured death and disease, and pursued different modes of healing.
Bulgarian and Ottoman-Turkish medical manuscripts and sources in comparison: insights on how people dealt with epidemics in the XVII-XVIII century (Yana Georgakieva) The Ottoman Turkish manuscripts are among the most widespread written sources in the Bulgarian lands. Unfortunately, still a significant amount of those historical documents remains uncatalogued and therefore has never been the object of detailed study. My presentation will focus on medical manuscripts currently preserved at the Oriental Department of St.St. Cyril and Methodius National Library – Sofia, Republic of Bulgaria. I will try to shed light on the correlation between the remedies in Bulgarian pharmacopoeias and those preserved in the Ottoman Turkish ones. Additionally, I will provide an overview of the archaeological situation in Bulgaria, which, at this stage of my research, seems to correspond to some of the sources. The cyclic epidemics within the Bulgarian lands have left intriguing scenes in certain churches and monasteries, and even specific features in Ottoman architecture, which I will discuss as well.
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TBA
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Discussions on smallpox and smallpox vaccination according to Şanizade - Yasemin Akçagüner (Columbia University, New York) The story of how the popular medical practice of variolation in the Ottoman Empire, championed chiefly by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, became part of learned medicine in the early eighteenth century in England is well known. Lesser known is the story of how vaccination made its way (back) to the Ottoman Empire. Building on recent studies showing the multidirectional exchange and circulation of scientific and medical knowledge, this chapter presents the first synthetic account of the arrival of the vaccine in Istanbul in 1800, through the lens of the Ottoman physician and court historian Şanizade Ataullah Efendi (d. 1826). Şanizade narrated the history of the vaccine’s arrival and relayed the European scholarly debate on the merits of the vaccine to an Ottoman scholarly readership in his 1820 publication The Mettle of Physicians (Miʿyarü’l-Eṭıbbā.) Taking part in this debate, Şanizade argued for the adoption of this new prophylaxis, but only if it was to be administered by qualified physicians who had proven their mettle thorough extensive book learning as well as excellence in surgical practice. With the vaccine’s arrival in Istanbul at the turn of the century, immunization against smallpox became the issue through which Şanizade advocated for the further professionalization of medicine.
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Merits of the Plague by Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani: Reflections on a New Translation - Joel Blecher (George Washington University) and Mairaj Syed (University of California, Davis)
In this session, Joel Blecher and Mairaj Syed will discuss their forthcoming translation of Ibn Hajar's plague treatise "Merits of the Plague" (Penguin, March 2023). They will not only share their experience of the process of translation but also discuss possible venues of scholarly research based on the translation.
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Cholera, the Hijaz Railroad: A Reversed Reasoning? - Benan Grams (Georgetown University, Washington DC.)
Nineteenth century’s contemporaries and later historians agree that ships and trains, modernized transportation technologies powered by the steam engine, facilitated the rapid spread of cholera, an infectious disease that was endemic to the Ganges Valley in India, to the rest of the world. Therefore, it was not surprising that when the Ottoman government announced its Hijaz railroad project, Western press expressed concerns, anticipating another route for cholera to spread after the Hajj pilgrimage from Hijaz to the Levant and the regions connected to it commercially.
This article explores the possibility of taking a different approach to the relationship between cholera and modern projects of transportation. Europeans’ control over key quarantine locations in the Mediterranean and the perceived humiliation Ottoman Muslims endured may have created popular support for the idea of the Hijaz railroad a decade before the actual initiation of the project. Such an approach would provide an additional lens to examine the Hijaz railroad project that is different from the conventional geo-political standpoint that has focused on the project’s ideological discourse and the political significance.
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Muteferriqa: Expanding Frontiers in Ottoman and Turkish Studies and Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Historical Research - C. Ozan Ceyhan (Miletos Inc.)
"Muteferriqa is an online research portal that contains an exceptionally rich collection of printed materials published in the Ottoman Empire, including mainly books and periodicals printed from the 18th to mid-20th century. It provides much more than a typical primary sources database through its enhanced search features, and its functionalities enabling discovery in both textual and visual content of the source materials. Muteferriqa overcomes language barriers in research and paves the way for cross-domain research collaborations by letting its users to search and read both in Turkish and in English in addition to Ottoman Turkish. In this presentation, I aim to demonstrate Muteferriqa and discuss the opportunities to expand frontiers for studies in the history of infectious disease."
Tunahan Durmaz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His research mainly focuses on Ottoman and European histories (15th to 18th centuries) with a special interest in social and cultural aspects of communicable diseases. Durmaz comes from a diverse background of humanities encompassing not only history but also history of art and architecture. He earned his BA (with honors) in History and Architecture (minor) in Middle East Technical University in June 2016, and his master’s degree in Sabancı University with a thesis titled “Family, Companions, and Death: Seyyid Hasan Nûrî Efendi’s Microcosm (1661-1665).”
Nukhet Varlik
Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health. She is the author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015) and editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017). Her new book project, “Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s-ca.1940s),” examines the six-hundred-year Ottoman plague experiencein a global ecological context. In conjunction with this research, she is involved in developing the Black Death Digital Archive and contributing to multidisciplinary research projects that incorporate perspectives from palaeogenetics (ancient DNA research in particular), bioarchaeology, disease ecology, and climate science into historical inquiry.
