Hidden Curriculum and Politicization of Medical Students in the Late Ottoman Empire.

Abstract

This article discusses the effect of medical education on politicization during the late Ottoman period. The article focuses on the nineteenth-century emergence of the epistemological and etiological shift in medicine on a global scale, which led to the dominance of the modernization paradigm in the environment of the Military School of Medicine in Istanbul. The ideas favoring modernization and progressivism became widespread through partnerships and differences between the two generations of physicians represented by the periods of Tanzimat (1839-1876) and Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Based on the narratives of prominent physicians of the late Ottoman and Early Republican Turkey, the article aims to illustrate that all the activities in the school resulted in the gradual transformation of the perspective of the students in contrast to their professors, interpreting the concept of progress as an effective basis to assist the modern aspirations of the administrative elites, composing the hidden curriculum of modern medical education in the Ottoman context. The younger generation began to equate materialism with solidarity, political activism, and insurgency, which would finally enable them to lead the movement against the monarchy or sultan. This generation would also occupy leading administrative positions in the first decades of the new Turkish Republic.