Turkish military hospital at the Skull Tower in Nis (1872-1878)

With a history that spans 146 years, the military hospital at the Skull Tower in Nis is one of the most esteemed medical institutions of the Army of the Republic of Serbia. However, in previous research about it, it was not sufficiently emphasized that the hospital was, in the same place and with the same function, an institution inherited from the Ottoman era, which ended in Nis in 1878. In Serbian historiography, there are practically no works on this topic. Therefore, we conducted research on the history of this military hospital in the period under the Ottomans. In that way, we achieved the goals of our research: to establish a direct connection between the Ottoman and Serbian military hospitals and to move the founding date of the military health institution at the Skull Tower further into the past. In addition, the research also led us to findings that challenge the established opinion in Serbian historiography that in Nis, during the last decades under the Ottomans, there were no highly educated health personnel and that modern medicine was not practiced there during that time. To achieve all this, we used unpublished Ottoman archival materials, narrative sources and Ottoman press from the 19th century, as well as the works of various scientific formats by contemporary Serbian, Turkish, and European authors.