Medical Doctors in Ottoman Iraq

A tale about freedom, individual liberties, and constitutionalism, the three chaptered The Dialect of Heroes written by the Baghdadi physician Sulayman Ghazala and republished in 1911, featured a cover with a young girl pointing to the starred Ottoman flag. Beneath her a quote drawn from the work states, “the crescent gives me hope as the star guides me: the end of adversity [is] the era of happiness.” The novella tells the struggle of educated professionals who challenged authoritarianism and traditions to elbow their way into government making. It begins by describing the state of the late Ottoman Empire: “under slavery, exposed to all sorts of calamities.” The second segment champions the narrative’s protagonists, “liberal-minded young men [who] came together to break the yoke,” and concludes with a chapter that celebrates “the victory of the Ottoman Empire” as signaled by “Sultan Muhammad al-Rashad [V] takes the throne of the caliphate.” Ghazala’s conclusion referred to Sultan Muhammad’s cession to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in 1908. The play was republished in 1911 when the empire’s borders shrunk further as Ghazala himself fled to Malta when he was ousted from Tripoli following the Italian invasion in 1911. This paper traces the life and professional mobility of Ghazala to showcase the production and reproduction of global medical knowledge and the rise of professionalization in the latter part of the Ottoman period. In employing a microhistorical lens, this paper argues that Ghazala’s profession afforded him a great degree of global mobility that rested on cultural capital accrued from and reemphasized in his participation in various and at times conflicting syndicates. From nationalist circles to medical associations, Ghazala participated in the production and circulation of global scientific knowledge that undergirded the nexus between language and literary culture revival, and the professionalization of medicine.