The proposed panels will focus on the movement of medical agents throughout the Middle East from the last decades of the nineteenth century till the 1970s, and will explore both the practical and the symbolic implications of this movement. Different speakers will explore the lives and experiences of doctors, nurses and medical students of various national and ethnic origins --as individuals and as groups-- and their mobility across countries, regions and empires. The papers will examine transnational and transregional movement as a crucial element in the distribution and circulation of medical knowledge, techniques, and practices, which also enabled multiple cultural and social encounters. They will likewise demonstrate the multiple ways in which this movement generated constructions of national, racial and cultural identities. Moreover, they will argue that the practice of medicine and the crossing of geographical borders enabled individuals to challenge gender roles and social borders, to traverse various barriers confronting them in their society of origin, and to forge new identities. The first panel, "Webs of Influence", will focus on medical agents who utilized their medical mission as vehicles for implementing biomedical knowledge, accumulating strategic, political or cultural power, and influencing the lives of various populations. The panel will explore agents of empires, governments and organizations, as well as agents of private initiatives, and the webs of connections, people and knowledge they created around the globe and between metropole and periphery. The papers will examine the circulation of doctors, nurses and medical students within the British, Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg and French Empires, as well as between colonial and post-colonial peripheries. The second panel, "Contested Identities", will trace the stories of individuals and groups, whose mobility as medical practitioners or students provided them with prestige and with a larger scope of influence and, at the same time, enabled them to question and negotiate national, ethnic, professional and gender identities. Empowered through their practice, they nevertheless often found themselves disadvantaged in the face of local circumstances and agents. This panel's protagonists traveled around the Middle East and between continents, from Syria to Palestine, from Nazareth to St. Petersburg, from Lagos to Jerusalem, and between France and Morocco.