New Regimes of Death and Disease in Early Modern Istanbul | Nükhet Varlık

Nükhet Varlık's research traces the emergence and evolution of healthscaping efforts and their broader political implications in the context of Ottoman early modernity. She examines how the Ottoman central administration developed a range of legal and institutional measures to make cities, particularly Istanbul, safer, cleaner, and more livable. These efforts reveal the deep entanglement of public health and sovereignty, as managing disease and mortality became a means of asserting state authority. She further explores how healthscaping helped expand the empire’s biopolitical and necropolitical power over its subjects—both living and dead, thus ultimately playing a key role in the process of Ottoman state formation.

In this talk, Nükhet Varlık will focus on the shifting regimes of death and disease in Istanbul during the first centuries of the Ottoman rule. As the city grew, its inhabitants encountered new and intensified threats to health, in addition to longstanding afflictions. Old diseases like plague continued alongside newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, such as syphilis and smallpox that became more virulent over time. Urban disasters—fires, earthquakes, and floods—claimed lives on an unprecedented scale, while construction, shipping, and new technologies introduced novel risks of injury and death. The growing use of firearms brought new forms of violence, and warfare continued to shape patterns of mortality through battlefield injuries and camp-borne infections. New substances imported from the New World infiltrated the city’s markets leading to new health problems, while providing treatment. The perils of urban life reshaped experiences of illness and death, prompting responses from the central administration, medical practitioners, and the urban population. This talk explores the strategies devised to confront these challenges, shedding light on the evolving relationship between governance, medical knowledge and practice, and the overall management of life and death in an early modern imperial capital.

Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, death, medicine, and public health. She is the author of award-winning Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015), editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017), and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Perspectives From Across the Mediterranean and Beyond (2022). In conjunction with her research addressing different aspects of death and disease in Ottoman society, she is the PI of the SHIFA-ANA project––an interdisciplinary research and public history initiative dedicated to the study of death, disease, and healing in Anatolia’s longue durée history. She is the co-editor of Stanford Ottoman World Series: Critical Studies in Empire, Nature, and Knowledge.