This panel aims at a critical engagement with the histories and everyday practices of medicine and health in the modern Middle East. It focuses on diverse sub-fields of health such as epidemics, environmental well-being, healing and self-care across the geo-cultural environments of the Mediterranean and West Asia, in the Ottoman, Iranian and Egyptian contexts; and it reveals commonalities in how different categories of scholars, healers and public officials as well as ‘everyday people’ produced knowledge about disease, health and medicine. Those often left outside of scholarly gaze such as non-elite women, working people, heterodox and fluid social groups such as ‘addicts’ and tribes – whatever they come to mean – become transformative agents of the life in this emerging geo-cultural space. Through the different contributions in the panel, the foundation of modern scientific institutions in medical education and public health are put into dialogue with the magical, the superstitious, and the traditional. What made an established belief superstitious? What counted as health or healing ritual? And in what way local practices of healing and health merged and coalesced with the new modern (Western) medicine? Where was the boundary of local knowledge and new modern knowledge drawn and by whom? In doing so, the panel also reflects upon the emerging place and direction of the medical humanities in new geo-cultural environments of health and life.
The collective work of the contributors is an attempt to blur dichotomies of Western vs. non-Western, local vs. global, peripheral vs. central that have been long-standing features of the study of the Middle East. We are interested in exploring alternative geographies – frontiers, pilgrimage paths, routes of labor and slavery – as well as topographies – urban arrangements, rural landscapes – through which people, commodities and pathogens moved, while paying attention to how these compared with constructions within and outside the region of what/who/which locality was considered healthy or sick.
The panel also seeks to reveal insights about the utility of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work on health. It attempts to open up new avenues for the Medical Humanities in the Middle East, highlighting the nexus of disciplines such as history and anthropology with epidemiology and public health, as well as politics. Not only we expect this to incite conceptual contamination between inherently inter-connected fields of knowledge, but we also expect it to promote methodological experimentation on the study of health, medicine, disease, and ultimately life.
-
Dr. Maziyar Ghiabi
‘I call on the god to grant us that most effective pharmakon, the best of all medicines: knowledge’. Thus writes Plato in Critias, the uncomplete work of the Greek philosopher where he discusses the Athenians’ resistance against Atlantis, a parable of the victory of the ‘good city’ versus the ‘decadent city’, of good knowledge versus falsehood. Pharmakon stands out in Plato’s argument as the paradigm capturing the drug/medicine, good/evil dichotomy, an ambiguity that triggered Jacques Derrida’s essay named Plato’s Pharmacy. In its linguistic journey from ancient Greek, pharmakon has acquired the meaning of ‘remedy’, ‘poison’ and ‘scapegoat’ at the same time. But does this ambiguity, which is semantic as much as it is semiotic, translate in contexts beyond the Western world, beyond the legacy of Greek civilisation?
In modern Iran, there is a word/substance that captures pharmakon’s coexistence of otherwise incongruous meanings. That word/substance is opium, taryak: a drug-poison, a drug-medicine, and a scapegoat. This paper is a historical anthropology of the lifeworld of opium from the late 19th century Iran, when taryak/opium embodied different, contradictory beings at the same time: 1) It was the hakim’s (traditional physician) first line of intervention in response to the most diverse of his patient’s ailments, but also the cause of health conditions vaguely identified later as ‘addiction’; 2) it was the primary antidote to the snake’s venom, but also one of the most used means to poison an enemy or to commit suicide; 3) it was the self-remedy to physical distress and psychosomatic malaise, but also the increasing source of public concern, a scapegoat for the nation’s political and cultural shortcomings, an impediment to becoming a modern civilisation.
The question of taryak/opium is an epitome of ontological politics concerning what is good and what is evil, what is life and life-inducing, from what is mortal, what is a panacea of all problems from what is a scapegoat for policy/polity failures. By discussing opium as the pharmakon in Iran’s public life and its troubled movement towards the foundation of the modern nation-state in 1925, the paper argues that the questions around the nature of what is pharmakon shows the intimate historical nexus between knowledge production about health and forms of political life. The paper is based on extensive archival documentation from 1880s to the late 1940s, including memoires, diaries, laws, medical reports and petitions on the question of opium and/or by people using opium.
-
Hande Yalnizoglu
In 1867, after a hiatus of more than thirty years, plague appeared among tribal communities close to the holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq and remained in Baghdad province episodically until 1881. Causing great alarm in Europe that had catalogued the plague as an eradicated scourge of the uncivilized past, the Ottomans were hard-pressed to contain the disease. Multiple committees of physicians and inspectors were dispatched by the governor of Baghdad, as well as the imperial center to locate, investigate and report on the initial outbreak in 1867 as well as the later episodes. The medical reports produced in the process and preserved in the Ottoman archives, in which the physicians engage, and sometimes medically inspect, tribal communities, provide a generative resource to study how medical information was exchanged and translated between the ‘professionals’ and local groups, and later codified and reported to the center. Beyond exhibiting profound understanding of the nature of the plague, I argue that the reports demonstrate the agency of local groups to craft and employ narratives for their own interest, leading to major disagreement between several physicians on whether the outbreak was indeed one of plague. Once international medical opinion established the outbreak as such, the original reports on it got made into many other things. Together with future inspection reports, they made up narratives of ‘plague in Baghdad/Mesopotamia’ in medical journals such as the Lancet, which declared this ‘unquestionably the most important addition to our knowledge of plague’ as well as lengthy reports in British Indian and various other medical journals. They also constituted the bulk of an official report titled ‘Modern History and Recent Progress of Levantine Plague’ that was presented to the UK Parliament in 1879. Through analysis of the life-journey of reporting on plague in Ottoman Iraq, this paper uncovers the multi-faceted nature of knowledge production on disease that was mired in the politics of translation, expertise and circulation. Engaging with recent scholarship on epidemiological orientalism, it aims to locate this episode, which coincided with sporadic outbreaks of plague in Libya and Yemen, as part of the increasing effort in the nineteenth-century to redefine the plague as a disease with origins in the Middle East.
-
Dr. Chris Sandal-Wilson
Starting in the 1930s, Palestinian families petitioned the British mandatory government demanding support with the care of relatives they deemed to be mentally ill. While certainly giving some insight into how families understood ‘mental illness’, what is perhaps more striking in these petitions is the way families strategically engaged with the mandate government, playing off colonial anxieties about political and social disorder – which were often deeply gendered in nature. These petitions thus allow us to understand Palestinian families – rather than medical authorities alone – as active in shaping the therapeutic experiences of mentally ill relatives, and moreover allow us to understand ‘mental illness’ itself as a generating a dense knot of hitherto overlooked interactions between colonial state and Palestinian society at precisely the point when relations between the two were most strained politically - suggesting the value of a medical humanities approach in understanding histories of colonialism in the region.
-
Dr. Hannah-Louise Clark
Focusing on colonial Algeria ca. 1890 to 1940, this paper explores what Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people learned about microbes and how they responded to bacteriological medicine. Many Algerians feared invisible spirits (jinn) and sought the healing powers of saints and exorcists. Was it then permitted for Muslims to use French treatments and follow Pasteurian rules of hygiene? Specialists in Islamic law, other intellectuals, and unlettered villagers showed a persistent concern with these and other questions in the wake of colonial conquest and violence in Algeria, as novel techniques, therapeutics, and forms of epistemic authority were introduced, and new visions of religious orthodoxy and national revival were formulated. This paper examines jinn theories and germ theories across a range of genres and formats—including newspaper advertisements, poetry, cartoons, and radio broadcasts—to show that Islamic tradition and law were integral to the emerging science and culture of microbes in early twentieth-century Algeria. While Islamic reformists sought to displace jinn theories of illness, other Algerian intellectuals and colonial officials found it convenient to explain germs in terms of jinn. Both French and Muslim elite men sought to combine religious law with hygienic advice to advance competing hegemonic projects targeted at the Muslim family, thereby attempting to displace women’s jinn-based practices.
