Samsun, Google and Prophetic Medicine

Sometimes the three most unrelated words can tell you a lot about a country when they are found on the news on the same day.

Samsun is a city of 605,000 people. It has symbolic importance as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk started the offensive against the occupying forces after World War I from Samsun. It was the first step in an epic journey. Therefore, I always thought of it to be a proud city. Furthermore, I thought it was doing well.

However, the reality is not so. The authorities declared on Tuesday, June 24, that half of Samsun’s population receives aid in the form of coal and kitchen supplies. The same authorities said this type of aid system makes people lazy. The district governors of Samsun claimed people do not show any interest to work once they are on the aid system. They say people quit looking for work and show no effort to better themselves. These are claims that would make any person offended to some degree, but it seems that either the district governors don’t know what they are talking about or Samsun and its people have changed a lot over the years, or so I thought.

However after reading about the statements that Minister of Health Mehmet Müezzinoğlu and Deputy Prime Minister Emrullah İşler made during the Prophetic Medicine Conference, I thought maybe the public at large is not to blame. Many things are changing in Turkey. The outlook on science, technology, medicine and women’s rights are all changing. Prophetic Medicine specifically refers to the Islamic Prophet Muhammad’s actions and words (hadith), with regards to sickness, treatment, hygiene, and the genre of writings undertaken primarily by non-physician scholars to collect and explicate these traditions. It is distinct from Islamic...