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.
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Dr. Benoit POUGET
The Mandatory power for a quarter of a century, France maintained close relations with Lebanon after the country's access to independence on November 23, 1943, formally executed in 1946. France therefore supported the construction of the Lebanese State in a context of internal political uncertainties and strong competition with other powers (the UK, the USA). French interests (political, economic and cultural) remained firmly anchored in Lebanon and since the first post-Mandate years France has sought to maintain privileged relations with its former territory. During the years of the Mandate, seeking to exercise colonialism by another name, France was particularly involved in public health missions in Lebanon. Sylvia Chiffoleau has shown how “the health action of the French mandate in Lebanon and Syria is at the crossroads of a charitable medicine, which relies on a dense network of private and community care institutions.” This dense medical network did not disappear with the country’s independence. It transformed into a relay of influence on which France relied to develop a policy of medical cooperation with Lebanon. This cooperation was based in particular on the maintenance and development of medical mobility (doctors, nurses, students, knowledge) between the two countries. It was part of a dynamic of support for the construction of the Lebanese State and its public health policies through the support provided to medical institutions of care and training. Finally, France was involved in a health diplomacy that aimed to defend their interests, presence and influence in Lebanon in a local situation of growing community tensions, even though the country was a space of competition between regional and international powers. This proposal will be based on meticulous research, based mainly on the French diplomatic archives (La Courneuve, Nantes).
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Dr. Moriel Ram
Focusing on Israel’s export of medical knowledge to African states from 1957 to 1973, we examine how the development of health aid constructs and fractures racialized national identities. Situating our historical discussion within the framework of the politics of health, we critically analyse how Israel sought to utilize health aid for its strategic interests by forming a set of interconnected sites we designate as a health archipelago. Through the archipelago, Israel mobilized medical knowledge, personnel and infrastructure that resonated with racialized perceptions while culturally dislocating itself from Africa. Based on archival work, this analysis of Israel’s medical archipelago illuminates the infra-political actions that shape state-centred development schemes. It uncovers how medical knowledge was not only imported from outside Africa but rather circulated through data collection, manipulation of limited resource and governance of immigration in ways that reorganise cultural hierarchies and national identities. Hence, discussing Israeli interventions in Africa enables us to pinpoint the transregional circulation of medical knowledge as it is inscribed in national identities, and to construct regional geopolitics through the movement of materials, individuals and knowledge between Africa and the Middle East.
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Mr. Hratch Kestenian
During the 19th century, scientific knowledge and medical influence did not flow exclusively from the West to the East. As such, non-Westerns were not passive recipients of Western sciences, but rather active transformers. Recent scholarship on knowledge production in the Ottoman Empire demonstrates that ideas were discussed and debated in very local terms. Public engagement in print ( as well as in salons and educational institutions ) allowed the creation of a circulation network among the various cities of the Ottoman world. Subsequently, medicine became part of the Ottoman Empire’s desire to compete with its European competitors for the hearts and souls of its citizens in the metropole and the peripheries.
In this paper, I will focus on Armenian doctors who created a medical network from Vienna to Istanbul, Tbilisi, Beirut, and Alexandria. I will argue that through the professionalization of medicine Armenian became a medical language, which allowed doctors to cross four different empires ( i.e., Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian, and British ) and circulate medical knowledge. While traversing these borders, doctors became both state and non-state agents capable of communicating in various languages such as French, Ottoman, German, Russian and Armenian. Translating works to a common language, i.e., Armenian gave these doctors an advantage over their colleagues and enabled them to bypass imperial and geographical boundaries.
These doctors played prominent roles in describing the socio-medical problems of the different Armenian communities across empires. To create productive and healthy subjects, they redefined “moral” and “immoral” behavior. As such, they viewed themselves as healers of both individual and national bodies. They penetrated the productive and reproductive spheres of society and tried to shape the behavior of ordinary people through medicine. Within this context, the doctor gained prestige, power, and prominence through clinical medicine, certification, and stethoscope. As a result, he could now dominate and colonize the body of the patient both in the metropole and the periphery. Consequently, the Armenian communities, throughout the Mediterranean, experienced a substantial increase in medical knowledge production, circulation, and translation.
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Ms. Hagit Krik
Between 1896 and 1965 the Overseas Nursing Association (ONA) recruited more than 8,000 British nurses to work throughout the British Empire. This London-based imperial philanthropic association had as its aim to disseminating western medicine, as well as a British model of the nursing profession, around the globe. Its records document the processes of recruitment, the movement of its agents around the empire, and the ongoing connections between these agents and the metropolitan center. Hundreds of these nurses were assigned to colonial and mandatory territories around the Middle East and Mediterranean, which formed a substantial part of this global and imperial nursing network. By applying western medical practices and regulating the lives of local populations, these women played a crucial role in the imperial project. While the ONA has received limited scholarly attention, most of its operation remains largely unexplored, particularly the history of its agents in the above regions. Based on official records and personal letters, the proposed presentation will trace the mobility of British nurses around the regions, and focuses on their roles and experiences in two particular territories: Palestine and Cyprus. Located in the margins of empire and administered as a Mandate Territory and a Crown Colony, the two study-cases present a variety of colonial governance, strategic importance, characteristics of local populations and contemporary circumstances. Rather than projecting a single image into many forms of colonial nursing, this comparative and trans-local account of colonial nursing allows to highlight its disparities as well as shared patterns across space and time and demonstrates its multifaceted nature.
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Mr. Francisco Javier Martinez Antonio
A dahir (decree) passed in 1916 in the French Protectorate in Morocco consecrated the monopoly of modern medicine for European doctors, leaving Moroccans confined to the exercise of Arabic classical and traditional medicine. Two collectives of practitioners were especially threatened by the new legislation: Protestant missionary physicians and Moroccan modern doctors. The former had arrived in Morocco in the mid-19th century, especially but not exclusively from Great Britain. After settling in coastal towns, they established themselves in Fez, Marrakech or Tetouan, though not without difficulties and occasionally facing violent rejection. The latter were the product of various initiatives of medical modernization promoted or tolerated by the sultans. These usually implied training outside Morocco (in the military hospital of Gibraltar in the 1870s; in courses for medical auxiliaries in the Medical School of Algiers in the 1900s), though some attended the Tangiers School of Medicine created in collaboration with Spanish authorities in the late 1880s. Stays abroad, modern training or both things often resulted in various degrees of professional and social alienation. The menace that the 1916 dahir posed for both groups was essentially due to similar reasons: the lack of a formal or complete medical training; the non-French nationality and, therefore, the eventual competition with the embryonic French medical system; the mixture of religion and science that successfully appealed to Moroccan patients.
In this presentation, we will provide a systematic picture of these collectives in the decades preceding the establishment of the French Protectorate in Morocco and, more specifically, the 1916 dahir. We will first identify the small number of individual doctors who integrated each group. We will later focus on how they engaged in transnational circulation and the impact of this on their professional and social identity in Morocco. Finally, we will analyze the outcome of the 1916 dahir for each collective and the arguments they presented to French authorities to defend their respective cause.
