Abstract
Healing the Nation examines prisoners of war (POWs), medicine, and nationalism in Turkey between 1914 and 1939. Author Yücel Yanıkdağ ascertains the emergence of Turkish identity among Ottoman POWs while they were captured as Ottomans during the First World War and repatriated as Turks at the end of the war. His unusual work encompasses not only the story of Ottoman POWs in Russian and British camps (the latter in Egypt) using more than a dozen POW camps’ newsletters, but also the assessments of neuropsychiatrists (neurologists and psychiatrists) who examined prisoners upon repatriation. On the one hand, studying POWs allows the author to analyse their perceptions of the nation, culture, and tradition. On the other hand, the creative study of the assessments of neuropsychiatrists during the post-war period between 1920 and 1939 paves the way for the author to show scientific results from an earlier period. Therefore, beginning with tracing Turkish nationalism among POWs and following with the analysis of the reports of medical doctors, Yanıkdağ creates a unique and untraditional approach to point out the trajectory of the emergence of Turkish nationalism among POWs.
The book stands on two pillars, the POW camps and the post-war efforts of neuropsychiatrists, in six chapters, excluding the introduction and epilogue. The first chapter begins with the general view of the Great War for Ottomans and those in POW camps in Russia and Egypt. The following three chapters examine prison camps in detail. The second chapter tells narratives of POWs and assesses comparisons of the two regions in which they were held. The following chapter meticulously traces prisoners’ thoughts on nationhood, empire, culture, and religion. Then chapter 4 focuses on camp diseases, mainly pellagra and trachoma. The following two chapters encapsulate the effects of captivity on their repatriation and return to civilian life, as well as the efforts of neuropsychiatrists. Chapter five includes their assessments on various mental breakdowns, and the last chapter encompasses the neuropsychiatrists’ approaches for healing the nation by addressing the problems they believed plagued the veterans, former prisoners, and the nation. Given the details in all chapters, the epilogue lays out how the new Turkish nation-state dealt with the traumatic experience of the Great War between 1914 and 1939.
Admittedly, for an ordinary reader, grasping a correlation between prisoners of war, medicine, and nationalism is not easy in sporadically written chapters, a notable disadvantage for the book. However, the value of the work is that it focuses on its main subject, and the author brilliantly binds these potentially sporadic issues in order to prove his argument. In addition to its main contribution to the literature on the Ottoman POWs in the Great War and its effects on the new Turkish Republic in general, the book makes three other claims worth highlighting in its review. First, ‘the complete or partial exclusion of the Great War from the nationalist historiography, nationalist discourse and even social memory’ in the early period of the new Turkish Republic is because ‘the young republic attempted at first to reject and exclude its Ottoman past’ (p. 257). In fact, this is the reason why contemporary military history literature has produced such limited works on the Ottomans during the First World War. This is why the author could not find enough memoirs of POWs for the post-war period and the reason he needed to use the works of neuropsychiatrists. He argues that ‘there were yet more factors in the specific post-war environment of İstanbul and the Anatolian peninsula that kept the former prisoners away from telling their stories’ (pp. 259–60). Second, the author sheds light on a recent debate in Turkish newspapers at the end of the 1990s that ‘the British blinded 15,000 Turks under scientific pretext’ (p. 161) in British POW camps in Egypt. It had been reported that ‘the prisoners were blinded by means of submerging them in creosol solution, purposefully mixed so as to be caustic to the eyes’ (p. 161). In chapter 4, Yücel Yanikdağ tells all the details of the disease trachoma in the POW camps and its later effects with historical evidence. And at the end of the chapter, he states ‘the journalistic myth-making has been appallingly successful in advancing the “purposeful blinding of prisoners” narrative’ (p. 163). He puts the last sentence on the debate as follows: ‘the narrative about an event might be constructed well before the historian reaches the scene’ (p. 163). Third, in the epilogue of Healing the Nation, Yanıkdağ gives some clues, as an additional claim along with other widely accepted political reasons, as to why Turkey did not enter the Second World War, with regard to the neuropsychiatrists’ work on the Turkish nation’s demographic realities.
Although we have reached the centennial of the Great War, there are relatively limited works on the roles of the Ottomans in the war, compared with works on those from other nations. The only exception is that there are a vast number of works on the Gallipoli campaign, thanks to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role as a general. Subsequently, any work on the issue is much appreciated by scholars. In fact, Healing the Nation moves beyond that point by tracing POW camps, though limited to Russian and British ones, and medical institutions instead of trenches and battlefields. Admittedly, the author’s approach is a methodologically creative way to discuss the Ottomans’ role in the Great War. Consequently, the medical publications, the bibliography, and above all the prisoners’ literature, including prison-camp newspapers, poems, folk songs, and cartoons that the author unearthed, make the book a real gem for scholars.