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Abstract
This thesis follows the heightened activation of the Turkish temperance movement between 1920 and 1924, during the anti-alcohol ban, which was enacted shortly after the Turkish Parliament moved to Ankara and lasted until a year after the founding of the Turkish Republic. This anti-alcohol ban was highly contentious among the public but it spurred tension between medical advocacy and economic pragmatism, as Ottoman debt burdens complicated the implementation of prohibition policies. Through analysis of medical writings, particularly those of prominent psychiatrist Mazhar Osman, and the activities of civil society organizations such as Hilal-i Ahdar (“Green Crescent Society”), this research demonstrates how medical professionals mobilized scientific discourse to position individual health behaviors as matters of national security and survival. Understanding the role of the medical experts in pushing their social concerns couched in their medical discourse of anti-alcoholism opens a window into the increasing significance of health in the later visions of population management and national prosperity. The temperance movement in Turkey emerged from the intersection of medical professionalization and wartime anxieties. The study reveals how the Balkan Wars and Great War created crucial conditions for the temperance movement's emergence in Turkey. The perception of alcohol consumption during the wartime economy shifted from a private choice into unpatriotic consumption and even a public health hazard, as medical authorities documented its deteriorating effects on individual and generational health. Repatriated prisoners of war became subjects of intensive medical observation in the broader vision of social engineering, projecting anxieties about contamination, degeneration, and social disorder that would later inform anti-alcohol rhetoric. The post-war occupation of Istanbul intensified these concerns, as prohibitionists identified increased alcohol consumption among foreign forces and refugees as evidence of cultural contamination and moral decay. While the anti-alcohol bill was short-lived, it established enduring patterns for conceptualizing the relationship between individual behavior and national welfare. Medical professionals who shaped and facilitated the public health measures in the interest of the state in Late Ottoman Empire continued their work in the Turkish Republic, as they refashioned themselves as the “pioneers” of modern Turkish health infrastructure, distinguished from its predecessor for its “modern” and “scientific” nature. By demonstrating how medical knowledge became instrumentalized for nationalist purposes amid wartime trauma and foreign occupation, this study offers insights into the early Republican health governance and the lasting influence of medicalized approaches to social policy in modern Turkey. Overall, this study addresses a strategic expansion of the state intervention in people’s daily lives through public health discourse from the end of the Ottoman Empire and into the emerging Turkish Republic.