Local texts on al-tibb al-shaabi, or folk medicine, craft an alternative narrative of the history of medicine in the Gulf under the development state. These texts address the period before the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century. In the Gulf region, shaabi has dramatically different cultural connotations than it does in other parts of the Arab world. Arabic-speaking nationals are in the minority and the working and lower classes are, in many cases, temporary and foreign. In this context, representations of al-tibb al-shaabi emerge out of ongoing politically and ideologically-charged efforts to rebrand local culture as national history. The category of al-tibb al-shaabi as it is used to describe medical practices in this region generally includes cautery (al-kaiyy) and cupping (al-hijama; expanding blood vessels by using cups for suction on the skin), prescribing herbal medicines, setting broken bones, attending to women’s and children’s health and midwifery, and, finally, religious healing rituals. This presentation traces how such narratives frame certain health practices as indigenous to the region and the ethnically Arab population. In this conceptualization, al-tibb al-shaabi is an immutable cultural artifact as well as a foil to biomedicine as an alienating and overly institutionalized experience. As a form of medical nostalgia, al-tibb al-shaabi is in direct conversation with the medical infrastructure of the welfare state. At the same time, it offers an alternative science that relies primarily on Arab nativist, rather than biomedical, discourses.