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Abstract

This thesis examines how medicine became the primary tool through which the Russian imperial state approached women in Turkestan. It argues that in Turkestan, women’s healthcare was as much about governing as it was about healing, a mechanism through which the empire sought to enter the domestic world of Muslim women and translate power into care. The opening of the first women’s clinic in 1883 marked the beginning of a new medical presence in the region, and the later proliferation of such clinics projected an image of progress. Yet these institutions brought little substantive change, revealing the contradictions of an imperial order that sought legitimacy through benevolence while withholding real agency from the very women it claimed to uplift. And while statistical reports projected an image of impressive success, events such as the cholera riot of 1892 revealed how limited their actual impact was in gaining trust and influencing everyday practices. The imperial framework, which positioned native women solely as recipients of care rather than participants in its provision, slowed progress in the field of childbirth, and no meaningful change occurred before 1920. Only in the Soviet period, when ideological goals and practical needs converged, did midwifery education, previously dismissed under imperial rule, become the first viable pathway for native women to enter the medical profession.