Journals of the Plague Year: The Ottoman Press and the Istanbul Cholera Outbreak of 1871

The outbreak of cholera in Istanbul in the autumn of 1871 has long been considered something of a historical non-event. Although responsible for several thousand deaths, in the historiography of the city it remains almost entirely obscured. Yet the 1871 outbreak briefly highlighted the social tensions in the burgeoning Istanbulite public sphere, and threatened to fracture the formerly "unified" Istanbulite medical establishment along spatial, colonial, and racialized lines. This article examines the reportage of four newspapers which circulated in Istanbul during the outbreak, each of which claimed to speak for a generalized public, albeit through very different methods. Three of these newspapers—the English-language The Levant Herald, the French-language La Turquie, and the Ottoman Turkish Basiret—were dailies with circulations in the thousands. The fourth paper, the French-language Gazette Médicale d'Orient, was instead the press organ of the city's emergent sanitary establishment. The responses of these papers to this sudden crisis revealed the underlying assumptions which animated Istanbulite social and medical discourse in the late Ottoman Empire, and the tensions inherent in claims to speak for public opinion or to act on behalf of global public health.