ABSTRACT

This article evaluates the establishment of a modern and centralized medicine in terms of creating boundaries between lay practitioners and the new medical staff in the Late Ottoman Empire. These boundaries were produced by the introduction of a legal framework and a new education system. This article intensifies the study on the process of definition of boundaries by a study of documents in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives. Have these boundaries been effectual in differentiating the traditional from the modern and setting a distinct group of medical actors? The answer to this question is sought by the description of a competitive environment for a multiplicity of actors of the domain of medicine. The article argues that the main problems of the process arose from the insufficient number of physicians and remoteness to the center and did not vanish until the foundation of a settled Muslim Turkish professional body in the 1890s.