Constructing the Healthy Individual in the Early Republic: Pronatalist Policies, Child Health, and Tuberculosis

Abstract

This article studies the issue of population in Turkey during the Early Republican Period by assessing the meanings attributed to children and children's health. The article discusses the approach to public health, wherein pronatalist policies and citizenship education are intertwined, and deliberates the solutions produced for the health problems of the period by focusing on the case of tuberculosis. By examining articles physicians wrote in health propaganda journals of the period, this article discusses how the focus of public health practices transformed in the 20th century, the direction personal hygiene took towards an area of individual responsibility, and how modern medicine was transformed into an unlimited field of intervention.