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Border-Crossing Patients and the History of Psychiatry in British Mandate Palestine
Abstract
Recent scholarship has argued for the resilience of regional patterns of mobility across the post-war colonial partition of the Levant, and foregrounded the agency of a range of characters who crisscrossed emergent borders. To a cast of muleteers, smugglers, rebels, and pilgrims (Abou-Hodeib 2020), this paper adds psychiatric patients. Across the first half of the twentieth century, hundreds of psychiatric patients from Palestine were admitted for treatment at the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Diseases outside Beirut. While consonant with the hospital’s aspirations to serve the wider region, the rationales behind these cross-border movements were complex, and particularly in the late 1930s and 1940s, these movements increasingly drew families, hospital authorities, and mandate governments into fraught and uncertain negotiations over responsibility for psychiatric patients across borders. Bringing together perspectives from histories of medicine and mobility, this paper concludes, can be productive for both subfields: by shaking histories of medicine free of methodological nationalism, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, by highlighting how mobilities which challenged, eluded, or exceeded the reach of the colonial state might simultaneously be driven by troubling intrafamilial dynamics.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Palestine
The Levant
Sub Area
None