The Dutiful Daughters of the British Empire: Psychosocial Topology of The British Hospital in Smyrna

Abstract

Scholarship on the accounts of the Western travellers about the Ottoman Empire focuses on some commonly known writers only, and Ismeer, or Smyrna, and its British hospital in 1855, by a lady [M. Nicol] remains neglected. It is a diary written by a lady-nurse, Martha Nicol, who worked in the British hospital in Smyrna, during the Crimean War. She is tightly bound in with the imperial ideology and by reconceptualising the space in the hospital, the lady-nurses help the British soldiers achieve a sense of continuity between their home back in England and the host culture about which they know very little. By playing a formative role to transpose this hospital to a homely space in a foreign territory, the lady-nurses function as psychic and cultural stabilisers. This essay aims to decipher how the hospital space functions as an ideological heterotopia of deviance, and how the lady-nurses contribute to its power to inspire the idea of “at-homeness” in the soldiers and retain the ideological structuring mechanisms in this distant location by exploring the textual evidence in the book. This essay will also explore how power and ideology are contextualised in the psychosocial topology of the hospital.