The SHIFA-ANA team is pleased to announce the next lecture in our series with ANAMED and CHSTM! This lecture will be delivered by our very own principal researcher, Dr. Nükhet Varlık! The lecture will be available for participants both in person and online over zoom. If you plan to join in person at ANAMED, Istanbul, please RSVP here. If you plan to attend over zoom, you may access through the CHSTM webpage here.
The Precarious City: New Regimes of Death and Disease in Early Modern Istanbul
My research traces the emergence and evolution of Ottoman healthscaping efforts and their broader political implications. I examine how the Ottoman central administration developed a range of legal and institutional measures to make cities, particularly Istanbul, safer, cleaner, and more livable during the early modern period. These efforts reveal the deep entanglement of public health and sovereignty, as managing disease and mortality became a means of asserting state authority. I further explore how healthscaping expanded the empire’s biopolitical and necropolitical power over its subjects—both living and dead—ultimately playing a key role in the process of Ottoman state formation.
In this talk, I will focus on the shifting regimes of death and disease in Istanbul during the first centuries of Ottoman rule. As the city grew, its inhabitants encountered new and intensified threats to health, in addition to longstanding afflictions. Old diseases like plague continued alongside newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, such as syphilis and smallpox that grew more virulent over time. Urban disasters—fires, earthquakes, and floods—claimed lives on an unprecedented scale, while construction, shipping, and new technologies introduced novel risks of injury and death. The growing use of firearms brought new forms of violence, and warfare continued to shape patterns of mortality through battlefield injuries and camp-borne infections. New substances imported from the New World infiltrated the city’s markets leading to new health problems. The perils of urban life reshaped experiences of illness and death, prompting responses from the central administration, medical practitioners, and the urban population of the city. This talk explores the strategies devised to confront these challenges, shedding light on the evolving relationship between governance, medical knowledge, and the management of life and death in an early modern imperial capital.
Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. Her research focuses on disease, death, medicine, and public health in the Ottoman Empire. She is the author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015), editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean(2017), and co-editor of Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Perspectives From Across the Mediterranean and Beyond (2022).