Biopolitical Empire: Syphilis, Medicine, and Sex in the Late Ottoman World

Biopolitical Empire employs biopolitics as the central framework to unearth the link between medicine, body, and making of an empire. And while doing so, it broadens the definition of the concept beyond a narrative of the regulation of life and death in that the power is nested. The book centers the analysis on a non-human agent such as syphilis to reveal multifaceted implications of biopolitics through countless encounters, confrontations, and negotiations of multiple historical agents including but not limited to the disease, the diseased, physicians, prostitutes, working-class men, and diverse members of a complex bureaucratic structure in the making of modern subjectivities, mentalities, and sensibilities shaping the late Ottoman context. In connection with these conceptual underlining, the book aims to make three important scholarly interventions to Ottoman/Middle Eastern studies as well as global histories of medical humanities and sexuality. First, it departs from debates that view Ottoman science and medicine as mere imports of Western scientific knowledge associated with progress and modernity. Instead, Biopolitical Empire demonstrates that Ottoman medical knowledge and practices framed around the problem of syphilis served as an effective tool through which the Ottomans governed and disciplined its population by cultivating specific ideas and practices of health – individual and public – in the minds and bodies of Ottoman citizens. Second, the book offers a new framework for the study of gender and sexuality by emphasizing how syphilis prompted Ottoman physicians to expound prolifically upon love, desire, and sexuality in the name of public morality by engaging in a new genre of medical advice for general readership. In the formation of a modern vocabulary of sex and sexuality, Ottoman physicians wrote about what was considered a private and taboo matter rather openly as an authentic and indispensable element of Ottoman modernity. Concerns about syphilis led doctors to invent a modern form of Ottoman sexology framed around questions of public health that rendered marriage, love, and desire necessary and functional as long as they led to reproduction—of family, society, the empire.  Third, while the global historiography of syphilis treats the disease largely as an urban phenomenon, my book demonstrates that syphilis was rather prevalent in the Ottoman countryside. Syphilis’ presence in rural areas posed significant challenges as well as opportunities to Ottoman authorities, who were obliged to treat and govern distant communities; and the study of syphilis captures how Ottoman physicians became mediums for the translation and implementation of new scientific and medical ideas and practices into local contexts, while they also competed and negotiated with local forms of medical care dominated by practitioners, healers, and medical missionaries.