Medicine, Sexuality, and Barbarism: Orientalist Discourses in O’Donovan’s Travels

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Humanities and Physical Education, Gonbad Kavous University

10.22080/jlab.2026.31243.1011

Abstract

In the late 19th century, Tsarist expansion into Central Asia drew European interest, especially in Turkomania. Although most local populations offered little resistance, the Turkmen mounted a determined opposition, culminating in Geok Tepe. Concerned that Russian expansion might threaten British India, the Daily News sent Edmond O’Donovan to report the conflict. Traveling via Persia, he was barred from Geok Tepe and redirected to Merv, where Turkmen authorities detained him as a potential British agent and named him one of their three leaders to secure support. He remained five months before being sent to Tehran to pursue it, which he abandoned on return to England. O’Donovan’s experiences were later published in The Merv Oasis, a travelogue that offers observations but bears a pronounced Orientalist gaze. In Persia, he characterizes medical practice as primitive and fatal, emphasizing alleged ethno-medical superstition and sensationalizing homoerotic behavior. In Turkomania, he depicts the Turkmen as barbaric, gluttonous, pleasure-seeking, and culturally primitive. This essay contends that, despite his Irish nationalist stance, O’Donovan’s travelogue reproduces familiar Western Orientalist tropes, portraying the East as morally, socially, and scientifically inferior to be observed, interpreted, and judged by European standards. Taken together, O’Donovan’s pages show travel writing as imperial meaning-making: observing, classifying, and judging the East within a European framework. The travelogue’s sensationalism—medicine depicted as primitive and homoerotic insinuations—exposes biases and the persistence of Orientalist schemas, even from a nationalist author. Thus The Merv Oasis fits into empire historiography, illustrating how detail coexists with stereotypes and rationalizes dominion in Central Asia.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Literature Across Borders
Volume 1, Issue 2 - Serial Number 2
Summer/Fall
September 2026
Pages 19-28

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