In an age when the sick still went to the barber to have their pulse taken, what did it mean to be a diplomaed, “modern” doctor? Doctor İbrahim Bey (1861–c. 1923) spent his life inside that question. Trained in the laboratories of Germany, he became the head-physician of the Hamidiye Etfal, the first children’s hospital in the Ottoman Empire to bear a sultan’s name, and rose from plain İbrahim Bey to İbrahim Paşa under Abdülhamid II. When the sultan was deposed, he fell with him. And then, pen in hand, he set about creating himself once more.
Through his diaries, his writings in the press, the hospital’s official yearbook and the Ottoman state archives, this book follows that lifelong labor of self-creation. In the crowded medical marketplace of the late Ottoman world, where barbers, bonesetters, and diplomaed physicians all healed side by side, a diploma on its own made no one anything. To be a modern doctor was not a title received but a self-built, and rebuilt, again and again. So, the question beneath this book is not only what “modern” and “professional” really meant, or who had the power to decide. But also: does a man create himself, or does a patron bring him into being, and when the patron falls, what remains?
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
A Note on Pronunciation
A Note on Titles
A Note on Dates
Acknowledgments
A Note for the Reader
Introduction: The Story Is His, The Questions Are Ours
“Not to a Doctor, but to the Barber”: Becoming a Doctor in the Nineteenth Century
Who Was İbrahim Bey?
From Master to Schoolroom: How Ottoman Medicine Became a Profession
“I Was Still Working in Koch’s Laboratory”: İbrahim Bey’s Days in Germany (1893-1895)
“I Beg to State That I Could Submit a Report and a Plan”: On the Threshold of the Hamidiye Etfal (1895-1899)
“An Embodied Witness”: The Hamidiye Etfal in the Mirror of the İstatistik (1899-1908)
A Hospital Without “Hamidiye”: The Constitution, the Deposition, and the Resignation (1908-1909)
“Europe Followed Islam Like a Pupil”: An Effort at Writing History
“Former Chief Physician of the Etfal Hospital”: Reconstructing Himself After the Fall (1909-1914)
