Cerrahpaşa Baths

The Cerrahpaşa Baths are a historic public hammam in the Fatih district of Istanbul, in the neighbourhood named after Cerrahpaşa (Surgeon Paşa) — an early 17th-century Grand Vizier who gave his name both to the area and to the Cerrahpaşa Hospital, one of Istanbul's oldest medical institutions, which continues to operate as a leading university hospital today. The neighbourhood's association with medicine gave its hammam particular resonance as a place of preventive hygiene, consistent with the Galenic medical understanding shared by Ottoman physicians that regular steam bathing prevented disease through the purging of harmful humours and the cleansing of the skin's pores. The baths served the residents of this historic Fatih neighbourhood, where the proximity of the hospital, the mosque, and the hammam embodied the Ottoman ideal of a complete community providing for its members' spiritual, medical, and hygienic needs.