Consumption, Medical Intelligence, and Prejudice: Tuberculosis in Early Republican Turkey’s Sociomedical Geographies

Abstract: Modernizing states progressively relied on citizens’ productivity and political compliance, while schooling and public health systems became essential for governance. Such projects, however, required wide-scale and intrusive acquisition and assembly of intelligence. As for its contemporary states and the preceding Ottoman Empire, the emergent Turkish republic was no different. In this article, we examine how the republic both sought health-related data amid its transition from a national movement into an independent nation-state and engaged with tuberculosis as a principal adversary. The primary sources we analyze in this inquiry are state-published sociomedical geographies authored in the 1920s and 1930s by provincial medical directors. Lacking epidemiological and etiological certainty about TB, reports often exhibited speculation and bias toward the peasantry, the impoverished, and particular places. Globally consistent, anti-TB objectives were not meaningfully realized until after World War II.