The provision of modern healthcare in the Arabian Peninsula has been a central feature in the changing relationship between residents and the state over the course of the twentieth century. Today, citizens and many non-citizen residents enjoy government coverage of their medical care, generously endowed hospitals and medical schools, and even state-funded “medical tourism” abroad. These public health privileges are often framed as a characteristic of the oil-rich welfare state. The beginning of modern medical care, however, predates the advent of oil wealth in this region. This presentation explores early twentieth-century transnational moments of healthcare provision on the ground in Bahrain and Muscat in which hospitals functioned as constructed social spaces where officials who considered themselves the harbingers of international expertise interacted with—and often misunderstood or ignored—local practices and expectations. The establishment of hospitals in Bahrain and Muscat in the first decade of the twentieth century emerged from a complex political environment characterized by tensions between British officials, local elites, and American missionaries. From its medical facilities in Bahrain, the American Mission sought to expand its presence to Muscat, a move that alarmed both the Omani Sultan Faisal bin Turki and the British authorities. In response, local British officials collaborated with the Sultan in 1909-1910 to establish a hospital of their own, calling on the support of entities ranging from representatives of various local communities to the British Navy and the Government of India. Citing archival records on the founding of early hospitals in Bahrain and Oman, this presentation demonstrates how specific flows of medical knowledge and individual patients and practitioners depended on and contributed to the Arabian Peninsula’s global connections in the early twentieth century. I am interested in how different methods of categorizing people—such as by gender, place of origin, local community, or religious affiliation—were institutionalized in the process of constructing medical facilities that were meant to serve a range of patients, from local women suffering the complications of pregnancy to British sailors in transit to India gripped by dysentery. Public health projects from this period offer rich material that demonstrates how the intimate political and societal connections between different regions in the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean regions shaped the experiences of residents.