Modernization, health politics and physicians of the Republican period in Turkey, 1920-1946

Abstract

For the social scientists, medical territory in Turkey is a field replete with diverse materials where one can discover, analyse and trace continuities and changes in Turkish biopolitical order. This article focuses on the period between 1920-1946, and it investigates the position of bodies, health politics and phsysicians in Turkish modernization experience as well as the fuctional, symbolic meanings and duties ascribed to them. According to dominant motifs of the time the Repuçlican regime sees the body as a functional and symbolic source of a new biopolitical order, therefore, it ascribes a vital importance to the characteristics of bodily capital and to the health of its citizens and nation body. The essential charecterictics of health politics of the time are treatment, prevention, populism, peasantism and statism. The main duty of physicians of Republic was inscribing the principles of new biopolitical order on the bodies of the citizens and mentoring the people. The medical gaze and health politics of the period construct the family, the school and the army as fields where biopolitical order is produced, national and civil values are inscribed in the citizens. Moreover, they try to knot the bodies with the umbilical cord of new biopolitical order. They also classify bodies and keep their medical record in relation to principles of the new order. They position the bodies according to this medical record which means the legitimization and support of bodies having the attributes of "sturdy", "fertile", "hygienic", "hard working", "productive" and "military" etc. Finally, they exclude the bodies which do not conform to the characteristics mentioned above, and see them as threats to the new biopolitical order.