Diagnosing the State: Medical Metaphors in Ottoman Political Writing

This paper traces the transformation in how Ottoman scribes, statesmen, and bureaucrats imagined the body politic from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century by focusing on metaphors derived from medicine and the human body. As others have shown, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman political writing demonstrates a clear influence of Galenic medicine and Aristotelian and Avicennan metaphysics in conceptualizing state and society. During the eighteenth century, however, we see the adoption of a Khaldunian conception of society as an organic unity with a determined lifespan, something that implies a shift in emphasis from spatiality to temporality of the polity. From the early Tanzimat onwards, we see sporadic use of modern medical, disease, and germ-related concepts to explain the problems of Ottoman politics and society. Our argument is that instead of a sudden shift from a Galenic to a modern medical vocabulary due to the impact of the West, Ottoman political imagery gradually changed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to administrative challenges. In narrating this transformation, we also reflect on how examining metaphors can contribute to our understanding of conceptual transformation and, particularly in our case, the concept of “state”.