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

This title explores how the Great War influenced the construction of identity and nationalism in the Ottoman Empire. This work 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: educated officer prisoners excluded peasants from their concept of the nation; and doctors used international socio-medicine to exclude all those – officers, enlisted men, civilians – they deemed to be hereditarily weak.