This paper examines the broader socio-political significance of the visual and textual dimensions of the early Arab medical journal, Al-Tabib: Majalla Tibbiyya ‘Ilmiyya Sina‘iyya Zira‘iyya that was edited by famed-Arab intellectual Ibrahim al-Yaziji, alongside physicians Bishara Zalzal and Khalil Sa‘ada. This short-lived journal (published between 1884-1885 in Beirut) had its origins in the 1870s, as Akhbar Tibiyya, which was published and edited by the American Missionary and medical practitioner, George E. Post, with involvement by Shahin Makariyus in Beirut in 1874. Under al-Yaziji’s direction, Al-Tabib's scope changed to address a broader audience (beyond medical practitioners). The establishment of medical programs within various institutions in Beirut, including the Syrian Protestant College and Saint Joseph University, contributed to the interest in such journals. However, periodicals like Al-Tabib were not solely concerned with medical practice, but rather engaged the contemporaneous interest in encyclopedic knowledge as it related to science and society. In fact, the debates and discussions within this journal extended to local and European perspectives on universalism, technology, and racial identity. This paper explores the largely unexamined aesthetic dimensions of the issues of Al-Tabib, including its layout design, drawings, etchings, and diagrams. This study thus sets out to gain an understanding of how these different elements contributed to a formulation of views on medical knowledge, as well as their association with views on language, race, and science—in the context of the Arab Nahda. While concerned with issues of medical practice, the readers, producers, and benefactors of this periodical were also local medical professionals and often members of literary and scientific societies, who constituted an elite coterie of modern intellectuals and readers. The examination of this journal’s materiality and circulation reveals that the views included within Al-Tabib were an extension of broader social and political debates of the time, when perspectives on medicine were linked to those on racial and national identity.