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Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914-1939

Online ISBN:
9780748689262
Print ISBN:
9780748665785
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914-1939

Yucel Yanikdag
Yucel Yanikdag
University of Richmond
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Published:
30 April 2013
Online ISBN:
9780748689262
Print ISBN:
9780748665785
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book investigates how Turkish nationalism was constructed by two closely related groups: Ottoman-Turkish prisoners of war in Russia and Egypt during the First World War, and Ottoman-Turkish psychiatrists who examined and diagnosed the prisoners following their post-war repatriation. The book first explores what the prisoners understood of nation, tradition, and Islam in the confines of prison camps as they attempted to identify the ills of their nation and empire. As the problems were identified and various solutions proposed, some of these views came to clash and sometimes converge. Second, turning to the doctors, it examines the role science played in the nation they wanted to build after the war. The prisoners’ and other soldiers’ shattered nerves became grounding points of profound social anxieties about the present and future of the Turkish nation. During the interwar years, when the military’s health was still taken to be a reflection of the nation’s health, the psychiatrists projected this worrisome picture, which they viewed as signs of national degeneration, onto the nation at large. Much like the officer prisoners in the camps discursively excluded the ignorant peasants from the nation, the psychiatrists wanted to reject those they deemed as a biological threat to the nation’s body. This book aims to broaden the discussion of nationalism to include both ideological and biological factors to consider how each influenced the other.

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