Samuel Dolbee, New York University
As children, many of us probably faked sick to go home from school at some point or another. Perhaps we did it because we preferred to spend the day on the couch eating popsicles and watching soap operas. Perhaps we did it because of a weird phobia of substitute teachers (I'm not speaking from experience here - I'm just saying that theoretically something like that could have happened at Deerpath Elementary School in Februrary of 1993 when Mrs. St. Claire was gone for a few days and it was really scary...theoretically speaking, of course). Whatever the reason, we concocted symptoms, tiptoed down to an infirmary redolent of cotton balls, and coughed or winced our way into convincing the nurse of our sickness. Or at least we secured enough of his or her pity for a reprieve.
It's safe to say, though, that Ali Effendi, a member of the Kurdish Şeydan tribe of Van, faced different stakes than all of those popsicle fiends and substitute-teacher phobes out there. In 1905, Ali attended the Ottoman School for Tribes in Istanbul. The sheer distance between the Beşiktaş school and Ali's family in Van meant that getting home was a serious journey. And, of course, this was the point of the institution, intended to co-opt the sons of tribal leaders on the margins of the empire into military service at the heart of the empire. Despite (and probably because of) this distance, Ali missed home, no doubt. But to get away, he didn't resort to subterfuge. He didn't conceal his ache for home with the clinically appropriate pain of a sore throat.
Indeed, it seems that for Ali, and the school officials who diagnosed him, missing home was an ailment in its own right. In the week before the memo - written on 11 April 1905 - the young man had fainted several times. Since then, his symptoms only intensified, lasting for hours each day. What did all of this mean? According to school officials, Ali suffered from a case of sevda-i vatan hastalığı (literally: love-for-home sickness). The treatment? Send him home.
This pathology of distance might seem odd today, but it shouldn't be surprising. The history of illness is filled with ailments unreal according to the medical textbooks of today, just as our lives today are filled with ailments that will be scoffed at by future generations. Take nostalgia, for example. In the 19th century, European doctors considered this condition to be "possibly fatal, contagious, and somehow deeply connected to French life." (7) Today nostalgia has been shorn of its pathological dimensions, functioning instead as an excuse for 80s night (admittedly, doctors of future generations may consider this phenomenon a scourge in its own right).
Another reason Ali's disease makes sense is that as all of the Tozsuz Evrak readers who keep a copy of A Moveable Empire under their pillow well know, the 19th century was about unprecedented movement and attempts to stop it or harness it in new ways. Disease was intimately connected with these dynamics. The cholera that ravaged working-class districts of cities all around the world stemmed from a very basic condition: fecal matter in the water supply. But many people confused poop with place, attributing cholera instead to the moral degradation of people only recently uprooted from the countryside and transplanted in the city. Place functioned importantly in the treatment of another nineteenth century malady, tuberculosis, evident in the legions of suffering writers who decamped from London's fog under doctor's orders for drier climes more appropriate for their constitutions. In short, geography mattered far more than bacteriology. And displacement could both cause and cure disease.
So Ali's ailment fit with prevailing ideas about unwellness at the time. But as any homesick student can tell you, all that mattered was whether the nurse trusted him.
Source: BOA MF.MKT 854/17 (1323 Ra 06)
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