Studying the then-developing profession of visiting nurses, the article demonstrates how tuberculosis (TB) control policies penetrated domestic spaces in 1940s–1960s Turkey. Visiting nurses were instrumental in making the domestic space become a site of welfare intervention. This profession is often associated with the pre-antibiotics TB control era, when improvement of the environment – especially the interior of the home – and a change in behaviour were seen as the only two ways of fighting this dreadful, ‘social’ disease. However, in Turkey, the İstanbul antituberculosis league started to train the first visiting nurses exactly at a time when social and environmental measures seemed to lose their relevance, due to the introduction of antibiotic s and the beginning of vaccination campaigns for the antituberculosis vaccine BCG. This change can partly be explained by the fact that TB control held another function: promoting the values of a ‘modern’, ‘civilised’, hygienic way of life. By studying written and visual sources, the article shows that this biopolitical dimension was embodied by nurses, employed by the state or private antituberculosis leagues, who entered people’s homes in order to teach them how to arrange and practise their own domestic space. This model of domesticity relied on the invisible work of housewives but was paradoxically promoted by these very visible working women who roamed the public space. The article explores how visiting nurses’ prescriptions shaped domestic space and domesticity, in a country where TB control was conceived as a national battle for civilization. By doing so, the article sheds light on how welfare and health contributed to the constant negotiation and paradoxes of gender and domestic norms in the (post-)Kemalist Republic, and explores the material and spatial dimensions of welfare policies.
Léa Delmaire (Wed,) studied this question.