This paper explores the expansion of American mission nursing in Iran in the early to mid-twentieth century. Between 1916 and 1936, American mission nurses operated the only nursing schools in the country. Although they instigated cultural changes by establishing American forms of nursing, they did so through the agency of local Iranian women who adapted nurse training to suit their own purposes. Drawing on the extensive records of the American Presbyterian Historical Society, as well as oral interviews, memoirs, newspapers and photographs, this paper demonstrates that mission nurses’ efforts to promote international nursing standards in Iran intersected with Reza Shah’s modernizing initiatives in a way that served Iranian nationalism and state-building. I argue that Iranian nurses took advantage of mission nursing as an avenue for financial, social, geographical and professional mobility. I reveal that the emergence of nursing professionalism in Iran was shaped by the intertwining of local, transnational and global connections and expertise. My paper will demonstrate that mission nursing was used by women in Iran in various ways. Assyrian Christian nurses often used their connections with American missionaries to permanently relocate to the United States. Thus, American-mission nursing in Iran became a stepping stone to emigration. Persian Iranian women often embraced professional nursing and became prominent leaders in Iran’s Ministry of Health. They used their mission connections to secure fellowships and grants to study in the United States, which was a means of securing leadership positions within Iranian healthcare. The considerable scholarship on the history of health care in Iran, and the Middle East more broadly, rarely mentions nurses. In recent years, historians have published a number of important works that critically explore the history of medical education, professionalization and practice in Iran, but nursing is rarely explored in these studies. My research makes a valuable contribution to the field. Colonial medicine was never unidirectional but rather a meaningful interaction with unintended consequences. My nursing-focused study will demonstrate that the Iranian government utilized American mission nurses in the development of state medicine, and that many of Iranian nurses who trained in mission-run nursing schools became leaders of the Iranian nursing profession.

“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.

In debates over the “Woman Question” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Islamic world, the education of women was a key theme, although it attracted less attention than related debates over women’s clothing. Qasim Amin’s 1899 The Liberation of Women advocated providing women with at least an elementary education so they could educate their children and produce good citizens to serve the Egyptian nation. The disdain expressed by Amin and other scholars towards “ignorant” women who were incapable of educating their children overlooked the historic role women played in the transmission of knowledge, not only in a public way that led to the recording of their contributions as nodes in the chain of transmission of hadith or listed as the teachers of prominent scholars, but also in spaces in which they received less formal recognition, such as the home. For children from learned families, education began in the home. Both boys and girls studied with their relatives, receiving a foundation in the Islamic sciences, primarily Quran and hadith. Girls learned alongside their brothers from their fathers, grandfathers, and other relatives, and boys also learned from their mothers and grandmothers. At a time of increased institutionalization of the transmission of knowledge in the form of the madrasa, the home was still the earliest site of encounter with the basics of faith and practice, where the Quran was interpreted through stories and the rituals of prayer were inscribed. Women were a logical choice for the first teachers of young children, if they themselves had achieved a certain level of knowledge; however, they rarely show up in the official lists of teachers for a scholar (fihris) or in their biographies. Traces of this role comes across in other types of narrative sources of a more autobiographical or intimate nature. This paper will examine the lives and educations of a number of scholars from premodern North Africa and interrogate the role of female family members as both caregivers and early teachers. Using biographical and autobiographical sources, among others, this study will explore the influence of women in the early education of scholars, and argue that highly educated primary caregivers played a significant role in the intellectual development of a scholar.