The social history of medicine in the Ottoman Empire and the historic Middle East is told in rich detail for the first time in English. Accessible and engaging, Ottoman Medicine sheds light on the work and power of medical practitioners in the Ottoman world. The enduring significance and fascinating history of Ottoman medicine emerge through a consideration of its medical ethics, troubled relationship with religion, standards of professionalism, bureaucratization and health systems management, and the extent of state control. Of interest to healthcare providers, healers, and patients, this book helps us better understand and appreciate the medical practices of non-Western societies.

This book explores the transformation in the healthcare system in Turkey since 2003, which has been portrayed as a benchmark for building universal healthcare systems in emerging market economies. Focussing on healthcare politics in an under-researched developing country context, it fills a significant lacuna in existing scholarship. This study answers these questions: What were the political dynamics that enabled the introduction of healthcare reform in Turkey? What political conflicts did the reform generate? How and to whose benefit have these conflicts been resolved? Drawing on qualitative interviews with a diverse set of actors, Yılmaz explores the actors’ subjective interpretations of the reform, the discourses and strategies they used to influence the reform, and the changing healthcare politics scene. He demonstrates that the reform has been a complex political process within which actors negotiated whether and to what extent healthcare remains a citizenship right or a commodity. This book will appeal to students and scholars of social policy, politics, health policy, public health and sociology.

For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.

Here, at last, is the massively updated and augmented second edition of this landmark encyclopedia. It contains approximately 1000 entries dealing in depth with the history of the scientific, technological and medical accomplishments of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. The entries consist of fully updated articles together with hundreds of entirely new topics. This unique reference work includes intercultural articles on broad topics such as mathematics and astronomy as well as thoughtful philosophical articles on concepts and ideas related to the study of non-Western Science, such as rationality, objectivity, and method. You’ll also find material on religion and science, East and West, and magic and science.

Health and Architecture offers a uniquely global overview of the healthcare facility in the pre-modern era, engaging in a cross-cultural analysis of the architectural response to medical developments and the formation of specialized hospitals as an independent building typology. Whether constructed as part of Chinese palaces in the 15th century or the religious complexes in 16th century Ottoman Istanbul, the healthcare facility throughout history is a built environment intended to promote healing and caring. The essays in this volume address how the relationships between architectural forms associated with healthcare and other buildings in the pre-modern era, such as bathhouses, almshouses, schools and places of worship, reflect changing attitudes towards healing. They explore the impact of medical advances on the design of hospitals across various times and geographies, and examine the historic construction processes and the stylistic connections between places of care and other building types, and their development in urban context. Deploying new methodological, interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to the analysis of healthcare facilities, Health and Architecture demonstrates how the spaces of healthcare themselves offer some of the most powerful and practical articulations of therapy.

Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Alexander Christie-Miller finds a story of the country’s history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future. Caught between two seas and two continents, Istanbul lies at the center of the most pressing challenges of our time. With environmental decay, rapacious development and tightening authoritarianism straining its social fabric to breaking point, it represents the precipitous moment civilizations around theworld are currently facing. In and around its crumbling Byzantine-era fortifications, Alexander Christie-Miller meets people who are experiencing the looming crisis and fighting back, sometimes triumphing despite the odds. To the City seamlessly blends two narratives: the story of Turkey’s tumultuous recent past told through the lives of those who live around the walls, and thestory of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II’s siege and capture of the city in 1453. That event still looms large in Turkey, as Recep Tayyip Erdogan like a latter-day sultan invokes its memory as part of his effort to transform the country in an echo of its imperial past. This is a meditation on the soul of Istanbul, a paean to its resilience and fortitude. To the City takes us on a narrative journey and along the way, we witness danger, beauty and hope.