Mandating immunity in the Ottoman Empire: A history of public health education and compulsory vaccination.

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 nation-building, the empire's histories of providing this foundation are also sometimes overlooked.

Framing "our social disaster": narratives of disease and sexuality in Turkey's early republic.

For the early Turkish republic, resource shortages, illiteracy, and geography combined to hamper any achievement of the immediate and universal diffusion of state-authored lessons in public health throughout the country's populace. One of the first steps taken to overcome these obstacles involved the production and publication of a medical atlas. Ideally, this text would serve both to standardize care provided by the state's health professionals and to inform the entire population of their public health obligations and compel their compliance; longer lives, prosperity, and a stronger nation were the promised outcomes. However, utilizing public health education to institute this state-society contract also entailed framing diseases in particular ways. This was especially true with sexually-transmitted infections (STIs), and the narratives associated with STIs marginalized routinely specific subpopulations of the Turkish nation; women and girls, generally, and sex workers, in particular. Focusing on this primary text, this article engages critically with the atlas to document, analyze, and inform the nature of this promise and the types of medical and moral norms that it imposed and reinforced.

"Not just eliminating the mosquito but draining the swamp": A critical geopolitics of Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Turkey's approach to illicit drugs.

In the 1970s, Turkey ceased to be a significant producer state of illicit drugs, but it continued to serve as a key route for the trade of drugs between East and West. Over the past decade, however, authorities identified two concerns beyond its continued transit state status. These reported problems entail both new modes of production and a rising incidence of drug abuse within the nation-state - particularly among its youth. Amid these developments, new law enforcement institutions emerged and acquired European sponsorship, leading to the establishment of TUBIM (the Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction). Coordinating with and reporting to the European Union agency EMCDDA (the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction), TUBIM's primary assigned duties entail the collection and analysis of data on drug abuse, trafficking, and prevention, the geographic identification of sites of concern (e.g. consumption, drug-related crimes, and peoples undergoing treatment), and the production of annual national reports. In this article, we examine the geopolitical origins of TUBIM as Turkey's central apparatus for confronting drug problems and its role as a vehicle for policy development, interpretation, and enforcement. In doing so, we emphasize the political and spatial dimensions inherent to the country's institutional and policy-driven approaches to contend with drug-related problems, and we assess how this line of attack reveals particular ambiguities in mission when evaluated from scales at world regional, national, and local levels. In sum, we assess how Turkey's new institutional and legislative landscapes condition the state's engagements with drug use, matters of user's health, and policy implementation at local scales and amid ongoing political developments.

Sex and the capital city: the political framing of syphilis and prostitution in early republican Ankara.

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.

Syphilis and prostitution in the socio-medical geographies of Turkey's early republican provinces.

During and after the Ottoman Empire's collapse, Turkey's fledgling public health and social services ministry sought to deal with the increasing prevalence of syphilis-especially in its rural communities. This article examines the emergence of state-led information collection in Turkey during the 1920s and early 1930s and the anti-syphilis campaigns that resulted, and thus explores how the state created a new medical and moral order surrounding its citizens' sexualities that came to focus its gaze upon prostitution. Utilizing information from official primary sources, we analyze this transformation as part of a broader process of medicalization and state expansion that made syphilis a subject for state regulation. Within this context, moral pronouncements regarding the disease, traditional medicine, and prostitution and the potential benefits of regulated brothels were reframed, represented, and dispersed as directives for public health policy. Through this research, we assess how field-based surveys contributed ultimately to republican regimes of regulating sex work that still persist.

"Poppies are democracy!" A critical geopolitics of opium eradication and reintroduction in Turkey.

Historical scholarship in traditional geopolitics often relied on documents authored by states and by other influential actors. Although much work in the subfield of critical geopolitics thus far has addressed imbalances constructed in official, academic, and popular media due to a privileging of such narratives, priority might also be given to unearthing and bringing to light alternative geopolitical perspectives from otherwise marginalized populations. Utilizing the early-1970s case of the United States' first "war on drugs," this article examines the geopolitics of opium-poppy eradication and its consequences within Turkey. Employing not only archival and secondary sources but also oral histories from now-retired poppy farmers, this study examines the diffusion of U.S. antinarcotics policies into the Anatolian countryside and the enduring impressions that the United States and Turkish government created. In doing so, this research gives voice to those farmers targeted by eradication policies and speaks more broadly to matters of narcotics control, sentiments of anti-Americanism, and notions of democracy in Turkey and the region, past and present.

Traditional ecologies of the opium poppy and oral history in rural Turkey.

Cultivated in the Eastern Mediterranean region for millennia, the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) was profoundly significant in the economies, ecologies, cultures, and diets of the peoples of many towns and villages of rural Anatolia. When the United States compelled Turkey to eradicate cultivation of the plant in the early 1970s in order to diminish the flow of heroin into America, farmers were obliged to deal with not only changes in their incomes but also profound changes in their relationships with the land and the state. Although Turkish officials later allowed production to resume in a highly controlled manner for pharmaceutical purposes, significant socioeconomic and ecological dimensions of Turkey's poppy-growing communities were forever changed. Interviewing now-retired poppy farmers, I employ oral history as my primary source of historical evidence to reconstruct these past ecologies and associated social relationships and to give voice to the informants.