Healing the Nation

Book excerpt: Yucel Yanikdag explores how, during the First World War, Ottoman prisoners of war and military doctors discursively constructed their nation as a community, and at the same time attempted to exclude certain groups from that nation. Those excluded were not always from different ethnic or religious groups as you might expect. The educated officer prisoners excluded the uncivilised and illiterate peasants from their concept of the nation, while doctors used international socio-medicine to exclude all those "e; officers, enlisted men, civilians "e; they deemed to be hereditarily weak.