Anatomy of Empire

Syphilis had existed in Ottoman society since the sixteenth century, but it became an alarming public health problem in the nineteenth century. As the epidemic raged with population movements across provincial and imperial borders, Ottoman authorities mobilized medical staff and implemented public hygiene regulations. Seçil Yilmaz unravels how a disease long associated with shame and secrecy became a key site through which Ottomans expanded their hegemony and governance, situating medicine and sex at the center of imperial rule.

Anatomy of Empire reveals the multifaceted implications of biopolitics found in the encounters and negotiations among the diseased, sex workers, working-class men, and physicians within a complex imperial bureaucracy. Medical knowledge and practices became effective tools to govern and discipline a population, particularly as Ottoman physicians formulated vernacular forms of sexology that re-fashioned love, desire, and marriage. As syphilis persisted across the world, Ottomans joined their European counterparts in pursuit of bacteriological discoveries to understand the causes behind the resilience of this silent yet destructive disease. With this book, Yilmaz offers a history of gender, sexuality, and medicine, one set in a consequential geography – in the lands of Ottomans at the verge of their demise – and unearths how truth regimes pertaining to the body and sexuality are indispensable components of modern imperial governance.