Özet:

In the Ottoman Empire, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the birth of public hygiene as a consistent government strategy, which marks the emergence of an innovative official approach to the exercise of state authority. With the emergence of the public hygiene, the state now became conceived to both survey and shape the urban environment and day-to-day social and individual lives in a much more pervasive manner and to ensure the health of the population. In addition to tracing the emergence and historical evolution of the late Ottoman public hygiene, this article suggests that it was the historical overlap between the development of a new form of political power and a drastic transformation in medical epistemology that principally paved the way for this policy. I furthermore argue that the Ottoman public hygiene policy intensified significantly from the late nineteenth century due to the particular conjecture of these years, which involved a set of unique developments, both scientific and social-political.

Anahtar Kelimeler: