4 - Colours of Disease and Death in the Early Modern Ottoman Cultural Imagination

Summary

And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and colors. Surely in this there are signs for people who have knowledge … And there are also Signs for those who take heed in the numerous things of various colors that He has created for you on earth.

(Qur’an: al-Rum, XXX, 22 and al-Nahl, XVI, 13)

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it quickly became clear that this new viral disease displayed different symptoms on white and coloured bodies. Before mass testing became available, these clinical differences caused problems in diagnosis and at times slowed down, complicated, impeded or altogether compromised treatment, eventu-ally aggravating the disproportionately higher infection and mortality rates among black and brown bodies in the United States. The punishing discrepancy among different racial groups painfully exposed the existing socio-economic inequalities in public health and access to healthcare resulting from deep-seated systemic racism. One aspect of this poignant discussion involved medical diagnosis – in particular, how diagnosis was deter-mined by skin colour. This should not be entirely surprising, as it was already well known that Western medical knowledge and practice has long favoured white bodies. Clinicians in the Global North are much better equipped to recognise and diagnose conditions as they appear on a white body than they are on a non-white body. For example, they are trained to diagnose skin lesions, rashes or blue lips in the manner those conditions appear on white skin. Since clinical research remains largely limited to diagnostic knowledge drawn from white skin, there exists a significant bias in knowledge and expertise among modern health professionals. Moreover, since the majority of published medical research is produced in the Global North, whence it is distributed, there is the additional risk of disseminating that bias globally – even where it may not be applicable to the majority of cases.

The practice of medical knowledge being drawn from and offered to the service of white bodies at the expense of non-white bodies is not unprecedented. Modern history of medicine has preserved numerous painful memories of such moments, including the exploitation of non-white bodies as ‘anatomical material’ in medical education and research.