This article is situated at the intersection of the history of health and welfare, transnational expertise, and the invisibility of women in the history of science. Maksudyan focuses on an epidemiological survey on children’s health in rural Turkey, undertaken in 1938 by Erna Ecsktein Schlossmann (1895–1998) and Albert Eckstein (1891–1950), an established German-Jewish paediatrician couple in exile. These village health surveys were state-sponsored tools of demographic governance and rural reform, collecting demographic data on pregnancy, abortion, childbirth and mortality, as well as hygiene data on cleanliness, water sources, housing, architecture and rural domestic spaces. Juxtaposing Albert Eckstein’s official reports to the Ministry of Health and published scholarly work with Erna Eckstein-Schlossmann’s ego documents, especially her travel diary, Maksudyan stresses the gendered division of labour on the terrain and in documentation and highlights the overlooked role of women both as subjects of inquiry and as co-producers of knowledge. The paper also approaches Eckstein’s village surveys as a ‘traveling laboratory’ of travelling doctors in exile, stressing the importance of milieu du savoir, as well as mobility. The Ecksteins encountered communities shaped by forced migration and displacement, producing hierarchies between various examples of domestic practices. Ultimately, the article reveals how medical fieldwork, conducted in private homes, among women and children, rendered intimate knowledge about reproductive health, domestic hygiene and child welfare legible to the state.
Nazan Maksudyan (Mon,) studied this question.