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

Yucel Yanikdag explores how, during the First World War, Ottoman prisoners of war and military doctors discursively constructed their nation as a community, and at the same time attempted to exclude certain groups from that nation. Those excluded were not always from different ethnic or religious groups as you might expect. The educated officer prisoners excluded the uncivilised and illiterate peasants from their concept of the nation, while doctors used international socio-medicine to exclude all those - officers, enlisted men, civilians - they deemed to be hereditarily weak.

Author: Yucel Yanikdag
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 08/20/2014
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780748695898

About the Author

Yücel Yanıkdağ is Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond. Born in Istanbul, he received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. A Fulbright-Hays scholar, his research interests include: social and cultural history of the Great War, social history of medicine, and Turkish nationalism. His articles have appeared in Journal of Contemporary History, Middle Eastern Studies, and The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Mediterranean.