Faking insanity in WWI: Turkish doctor Osman foils British officers’ escape plan

During World War I, British prisoners of war captured at Kut al-Amara and sent to a camp in Yozgat attempted a escape by faking insanity. Their plan, however, ran into a major obstacle in Istanbul—Türkiye’s pioneering psychiatrist, Dr. Mazhar Osman.

A newly reprinted edition of “The Road to Endor,” originally published in 1919, recounts the extraordinary tale of Lieutenant Elias Henry Jones and Cedric Waters Hill. The two officers were among thousands of British troops taken prisoner on April 29, 1916, by Ottoman forces after the Siege of Kut. They were later transferred to an internment camp in Yozgat, deep in central Anatolia.

‘Yozgat was a prison within a prison’

In the book, Jones recalls their time in Yozgat with stark realism: “Escaping from a prison camp in Türkiye was already difficult; from Yozgat, it was impossible. It was the Ottoman punishment camp. We knew what ‘trouble’ meant in Türkiye. We had felt the claws of the Turks at Kut and had seen what they were capable of. Yozgat was no Donnington Hall—it was a bare roof and a floor to sleep on. It was prison inside a prison.”

Desperate for a way out, Jones and Hill devised a daring escape plot involving seances and psychological deception. They staged spiritualist rituals, feigned mental illness, and eventually succeeded in getting themselves transferred to Haydarpasa Military Hospital in Istanbul on May 8, 1918. The goal was to obtain psychiatric evaluations declaring them unfit for captivity and thus secure repatriation.

Face to face with a titan of Turkish psychiatry

Arccording to Hurriyet, what they did not anticipate was that their fate would rest in the hands of Dr. Mazhar Osman—already a towering figure in Turkish medical circles and the future founder of the Bakirkoy Mental Health Hospital in 1924.

In the book, Jones recalls their brief and nerve-wracking encounter with Dr. Osman: “We were examined by nearly two dozen doctors—Turkish, German, Austrian, Dutch, Greek, Armenian, and English. But none made us fear exposure like Mazhar Osman. We suspected he knew everything. Fortunately, he was so busy he barely had time for us. Apart from short appearances in morning sessions, we were mostly seen by junior doctors. Had it been otherwise, we would have surely been exposed.”

Though Osman himself did not fall for the ruse, the British officers eventually managed to deceive his less experienced colleagues. They obtained the reports they needed and were released shortly after. Jones would later write “The Road to Endor,” chronicling their wartime experiences and elaborate deception.

A national pioneer in psychiatry

Mazhar Osman’s legacy lives on as one of the founding figures of modern psychiatry in Türkiye. His name is immortalised at the psychiatric hospital he established in Bakirkoy, where a bust of him now stands beside a statue of Rodin’s Thinker.