“Allopathy for the Masses” adds nuance to the story of modern medicine in the Middle East by demonstrating the agency of uneducated Iranian patients in the Pahlavi period (1925-79). In the late nineteenth century, peasants encountered western-educated medical practitioners and learned that allopathy, or the use of pharmaceutical drugs to counteract symptoms, differed from traditional practices of curing ailments. Rather than cling to the old, Iranians interfaced with these new practitioners, demanding higher standards of care, filing medical malpractice law suits, and inviting doctors to research the curative potential of herbs and spices. Thus, common Iranians left an indelible mark on the practice of modern medicine, shaping medical training and research to suit their needs. Influenced by Michel Foucault, many historians of the Middle East have studied the state’s use of medicine to insert itself into the lives of citizens. Scholars have effectively argued that the reform movement to modernize medicine reproduced European and colonial prejudices, casting peasants as “uncivilized” defenders of superstition and western-educated physicians as “civilized” contributors to national advancement. My research, however, explores the historical exchange between patients and medical practitioners. Without question, physicians, pharmacists, and nurses applied new forms of knowledge in order to “civilize” Iranian peasants and distance them from traditional knowledge; those same patients, however, absorbed new medical methods and approached practitioners with sophisticated demands. By using Iranian archives, this social history reveals the dynamic nature of patient-physician relationships in Pahlavi Iran. The paper engages sources that include law suits filed by patients against physicians, law enforcement investigations of medical malpractice, medical research of herbs and spices, as well as a robust secondary literature regarding the application of medicine in the Middle East.