ABSTRACT
Throughout time, people have characterized cities as seats of sin and vice, on the one hand, and as the highest expressions of civilization, on the other hand. Similarly, and oftentimes quite apart from empirical evidence, stereotypes also connect urban areas with notions either of health and safety or of illness and insecurity. In the contexts of modern societies and secular states that together began to advocate public health agendas, leaders deployed together notions of medical science and civic morality as the means to realize hygiene, demographic security, and economic prosperity. Not all citizens, however, were held equally accountable. Drawing on histories of public health in the emergent Turkish republic of the 1920s, we examine how these themes of sin and sickness were recast within the spaces and ideals of the urban.
