Haseki Women’s Hospital and the female destitute of nineteenth-century Istanbul

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10280720
AutoresGülhan Balsoy (0000-0002-0466-650X, Department of History, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen55
Número3
Páginas289-300
Fecha de publicación2018-12-07
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMiddle Eastern Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0026-3206 • E-ISSN: 1743-7881
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00263206.2018.1520099
OpenAlexW2905276284
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4

This article is on one of the longest-lived medical institutions of the Ottoman Empire, the Haseki Hospital. I will try to glimpse to the daily workings of the Haseki Hospital and the transformations it underwent in terms of the services it offered, its patients, its social functions, and its relevance for the urban lives of the destitute women of the empire for the period between the 1830s and 1893. During that period, the Haseki Women's Hospital was an institution hosting poor and destitute women as well as pregnant, ill, feeble-minded, convicted women, widows, prostitutes, and orphans. Although it has been called a hospital, it has been used as a women's hospital, lying-in clinic, madness asylum, widow's house, orphanage, and a women's prison. I submit that the Haseki Women's Hospital fulfilled a dual purpose by combining social relief services with medical care for female patients. Besides being a locus of medicine, the hospital was also a site where women in the margins were confined and isolated, but also received care otherwise denied to them. Along these lines, this article searches the vulnerability of the destitute women of nineteenth century Istanbul

Ancient history · Criminology · Empire · Family medicine · Institution · Ottoman empire · Political science · Prison · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Medicine · Ottoman and Turkish Studies · Ottoman Empire History and Society