The team at SHIFA-ANA is excited to announce the third lecture in the SHIFA-ANA lecture series regarding death and disease in Anatolia! We will be joined by esteemed academics Cihangir Gündoğdu and Gülhan Balsoy of Istanbul Bilgi University at ANAMED on November 27, 2024 at 11:00 am ET. This lecture will be available both in person and online.
In the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire established a state-sponsored system for inspecting and registering the deceased. For the first time, medical professionals known as tabib were employed to investigate the causes of death within the city limits of Istanbul. This initial surveillance effort, conducted in 1838–39, resulted in the creation of the city’s first two death registers, which documented a total of 9,500 individual cases. In this presentation, we will explore the surveillance of death and disease in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. By examining the disease category, we aim to further discuss the causes of death and their connections with gender, age, ethnicity, profession, and location.
Cihangir Gündoğdu is a faculty member in Istanbul Bilgi University’s Department of History. His areas of concentration include the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the history of medicine and the history of nonhuman animals. His work has appeared in Middle Eastern Studies and Society & Animals. His current project with Gülhan Balsoy investigates the first two Ottoman death registers kept for the years 1838 and 1839.
Gülhan Balsoy is a professor of history at Istanbul Bilgi University, Department of History. She is the author of The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (Routledge, 2013). Her research interests include late Ottoman social history, the history of women and gender, and the history of medicine. Besides her project on Ottoman death registers, she is also working on a book project that explores gender and destitution in the nineteenth century.
Those who wish to attend this lecture in person at ANAMED in Istanbul can RSVP here, while those who wish to attend the meeting over zoom can register here. The team at SHIFA-ANA is delighted to have the opportunity for such incredible scholars to advance our understanding and knowledge of the past, present, and future. See you there!