Abstract
Having adopted an understanding of a social state, the Anatolian Turkish States attached great importance to public health and built their health centres accordingly. The Turks, influenced by Islamic civilization, combined the word ‘dar’ which stood for ‘home’ in Arabic, and ‘şifa’ which meant ‘recovery’ and ‘cure’, and gave the name darüşşifa to these institutions providing public health care. After serving the Turkish society for centuries, darüşşifas were not able to adapt to the technical conditions of modern medicine, and were replaced by “hastane”s – a name borrowed from Persian with an Ottoman influence, first coined by Ahmet Vefik Pasha in 1876. In this study, after an investigation of how Ottoman health centres developed and were transformed from “darüşşifa” to “hastane”, the health structures of the Late Ottoman Period were evaluated with examples chosen particularly from the province of Adana. Within the scope of the study, architectural projects attained through literature were evaluated, theses and articles written on the subject were examined, and the Ottoman archives were consulted. The study aims to track the progress of Ottoman health institutions with respect to emerging requirements and provide a mass collection identifying late period hospital structures.