The eye disease trachoma was a significant public health problem in Mandate Palestine. This paper investigates how the Hadassah-sponsored health campaign against trachoma in the Yishuv became a focal point in considering the relationships between Jewish and Arab identities, cultures, and environments in an era of nationalist development, both in terms of constructing the campaign itself and in the physician-patient encounter. This locus of complex interactions comprises how ophthalmologists both contributed to and resisted Orientalist conceptions of trachomatous patients, how medical campaigns in the Yishuv set the stage in creating the ethnic hierarchies that appear in health policies post-statehood, and in understanding how ophthalmologists were uniquely situated to serve as “Orientalist experts”. To convey the range of attitudes ophthalmologists had towards their Middle Eastern Jewish patients, I will draw on the analytic frame of "The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State" by sociologist Gil Eyal, who argues against the standard European supremacy attitude of early Zionism by explaining types of hybrids that both “marked and transgressed” the line between Jew and Arab. I posit that the relationship between ophthalmologists and their patients serves as yet another focal point that permitted a horizon of possible relationships with the Orient. Hadassah physicians were intent on eradicating the disease and providing the best care, even though they provided cultural and social arguments for the etiology of trachoma. This dichotomy reveals the tension within the medical project as a whole: although the trachoma campaign was part of a nationalizing and westernizing mission, it also served as an occasion to reinforce the separation of anything “Arab”. The epidemiology of trachoma lended itself to be constructed as a disease that was uniquely receptive to biological, cultural, and social interventions. Pulling primarily from the Hadassah Medical Organization papers at the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, I analyze the role and practices of the “circuit ophthalmologist” (rofe noded)—who traveled to rural settlements and moshavot as part of Hadassah's "war against trachoma"—in order to explore the role of colonial medicine in the formulation of ideas about race and difference.