Abstract:

Avram(ino) de Castro, born in 1829 in Istanbul, has been sent to Paris for a year by the Ottoman government after his graduation from the Imperial Military Medical School (Mekteb-i Tibbiye-i Şahane) in 1859. He went to Italy by his own financial means and continued there his education for three more years. When he returned to Istanbul, he worked at the Maltepe Hospital for a while and then was appointed to the Süleymaniye Lunatic Asylum as a civilian doctor. He started to work as the assistant of Dr. Luigi Mongeri (1815-1882), the chief physician of the asylum, and carried on to work in the same position after Süleymaniye Lunatic Asylum has moved to Toptaşı, Scutari. Following the death of Dr. L. Mongeri sen. in 1882, Dr. A. de Castro was appointed chief physician to the asylum.  Avram de Castro worked as a physician in the Ottoman Empire for about 45 years. He served for 36 years at Toptaşı Lunatic Asylum where he acted as director between the years 1882-1908. He retired on 14th November 1908, following the proclamation of the Second Constitutio. During Dr. de Castro’s administration, the asylum experienced a serious lack of capacity and its patients suffered greately from the cholera epidemic of 1893. Dr. de Castro authored a number of medico-legal reports and a few statistics of the Toptaşı Asylum, all published in the Gazette Medicale d’Orient (Istanbul), the journal of the Medical Society of Constantinople, of which he was a member. 

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