This paper analyzes literary, filmic, and medical sources from the 1940s to the present to argue that supernatural and psychiatric understandings of illness and treatment were shaped not only by culturally meaningful practices but also by immediate political goals tied to gendered, ethnic and class-based identities in Israel and Palestine. Analysis of these treatment modalities contribute to conversations on notions of the worthy and sacrificial body and encourage us to consider multiple discourses of national strength, family politics, and individual worth. Reflecting on a source base that includes the text of legislation (such as the Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities Law of 1998 in Israel), Hebrew- and Arabic-language press sources, two films, historical fiction, two memoirs, oral history interviews, records from public and private hospitals and centers in Gaza, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and nearby sites from the British Mandate period as well as the period since 1948, this paper suggests possible future directions for research in the connections between political violence, stigma, treatment, and policy reform. Considering publications such as Bashir and Goldberg’s 2019 The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History and Wilkinson and Kleinman’s 2016 A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering, this research applies a blend of medical, social, and cultural history approaches inspired by interdisciplinary research in trauma and disability studies. This paper suggests that Palestinian and Israeli societies are inextricably linked to questions of collective and individual sacrifice that frequently stigmatize illness even as everyday life and national goals perpetuate conditions that sicken and traumatize the very bodies expected to build a stronger, healthier nation. In such an atmosphere, "treatment" has at times amounted to deliberate forgetting and rewriting of the past and present, rather than facing the root causes of illness to attempt a national, collective, or even family reckoning. Applying theories in disability studies research would call for education and policy reform to raise awareness, destigmatize non-normative bodies, promote inclusion and equity, and encourage future organizing.