Mother of Abundance, Queen of the Ill: Bezmiâlem Sultan and the Architectures of Tahaffuz

In 1845, following successive outbreaks of epidemic diseases in Istanbul such as plague and cholera, the Queen Mother Bezmiâlem commissioned the construction of a new civil hospital complex for the urban poor called the Gureba Hastanesi (Paupers’ Hospital). This was part of a broader programme of medical patronage throughout the Ottoman Empire. I argue that Bezmiâlem drew inspiration from traditional venues for women’s patronage, including hospitals and public fountains. Her structures reflected a newly globalized fight against epidemic disease, but Bezmiâlem’s sanitary infrastructure also referenced her own public illness. The newly instituted practice of quarantine was rephrased from a state-mandated punishment into a collective ethical duty, exemplified by the neologism ‘method of protection’. Building upon studies of women’s self-representation in Islamic architecture, I explore how the complex functioned as an architectural synecdoche for Bezmiâlem’s body, and examine the loggia of the complex’s mosque as a space in which the positions of the patron and patient were placed in close proximity. I situate the complex within Bezmiâlem’s wider patronage projects and propose that the emotional investment in Bezmiâlem as a patron figure played a crucial role in the diffusion of new medical governance across the Ottoman Empire.