Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

History

Advisor

Beth Baron

Committee Members

Samira Haj

Andreas Killen

Bedross Der Matossian

Subject Categories

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Intellectual History | Islamic World and Near East History | Social History

Keywords

Tuberculosis; Ottoman Medicine; Medicalization; Social Disease; Public Health; Medical Networks

Abstract

This dissertation examines how tuberculosis (TB) became a “social disease” (maraz-ı ictimâʻî ) in the late Ottoman Empire. Focusing on the period from the early 19th century to the aftermath of World War I, it traces how Ottoman doctors, reformers, and public health advocates conceptualized and responded to TB (verem) not merely as a medical condition, but as a social threat. Drawing on multilingual sources—including Armenian, Ottoman-Turkish, and Arabic medical periodicals, archival records, hygienic manuals, poetry, novels, and institutional reports—this project explores how tuberculosis became a prism through which Ottoman society negotiated evolving ideas about morality, governance, and modernity.

Focusing primarily on the Ottoman capital, and during a period of “centralization,” the dissertation engages with a diverse array of actors: State-physicians, mobile medical students trained in Paris and Vienna, foreign doctors, and bureaucrats concerned with public health reforms. Rather than treating TB solely as a biomedical phenomenon, I argue that its transformation into a social and moral concern occurred through a process of narration, institutionalization, and contestation. I contend that tuberculosis served as a flexible discursive and diagnostic category—one that wavered between hereditary, environmental, and microbial explanations, and came to reflect larger anxieties about urbanization and civic virtue. TB thus became a means to articulate ideals of the hygienic citizen, regulate behavior, and reimagine the relationship between individuals and the state.

The dissertation advances three significant contributions. First, it treats tuberculosis as a social, moral, and conceptual category. TB was not merely a biological illness but a politicized condition that shifted attention from pathogen to person, from bacteria to behavior. It became a discourse through which public health actors debated civic virtue, responsibility, and risk. Drawing on a range of medical and literary sources, I demonstrate that TB was an unstable category, wavering between hereditary, environmental, and microbial theories—thus functioning both as clinical reality and cultural metaphor. Second, I reframe the history of Ottoman biomedicine by challenging the notion that it passively mirrored Western models. Instead, I show that modern biomedicine was a global and contested formation. I demonstrate how the alliance between the Ottoman state and the medical intelligentsia produced new forms of centralized authority and promoted hygienic subjectivities—citizens who were trained to see health as a personal and national duty. I further examine how biopolitical practices were enacted, debated, and localized within diverse social and moral frameworks. Third, this study expands the historiography of Ottoman medicine by incorporating overlooked Armenian-language medical texts. By foregrounding Armenian-language medical texts and the transimperial circulation of doctors, diagnoses, and print culture, it expands the archive of Ottoman medicine beyond state-centered accounts. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the making of tuberculosis as a social disease was also the making of the modern Ottoman subject—through intertwined processes of bureaucratic surveillance, medical knowledge production, and moral governance.

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