In the winter of 1953, the international Jewish philanthropic organizations, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and Oeuvres Secours des Enfants (OSE), conducted the “Mass Trachoma Project” in one square block of Casablanca’s mellah (Jewish quarter). The infectious eye disease trachoma was endemic throughout North Africa, and was doubly marked: first, as a disease of poor hygiene and primitive culture owing to its particular etiology; and second, as a “blinding scourge of the East,” as a result of its prevalence in the Arab world. The “Mass Trachoma Project” was emblematic of the disease control campaigns that characterized international health in the postwar period implemented through new technical interventions, such as antibiotics. Indeed, JDC efforts were concurrent with World Health Organization (WHO) anti-trachoma campaigns in Morocco, and mimicked its practices while paying heed to new currents of social medicine. As medical restrictions on immigration to Israel ended, this campaign not only served to cure Jews prior to their anticipated departure, but also to present the JDC as an international organization on a par with the WHO that participated in health development. Using material from the World Health Organization archives, the JDC archives, and medical publications, my paper will analyze why trachoma in North Africa captured the JDC’s attention during the 1950s, and how their response fit within a global conversation. I claim that a historical investigation of Jewish anti-trachoma efforts in Morocco foregrounds often overlooked actors of postwar colonial medicine, and demonstrates how international Jewish philanthropic organizations took part in shaping global health priorities.

BUILDING A BROTHEL CITY: REZA SHAH OF IRAN'S SOCIAL AND HEALTH POLICIES (1926-1945) Once the power of Reza Shah was consolidated, he undertook a broad program of reform and modernization part of which directly related to public health. Among these were birth control and sexually transmittable diseases. The government took the initiative to construct a Brothel City (Shahr-e Now) in Tehran and to accommodate sex workers in a particular compound where they could be under close medical observation. While the government’s overall policy of supervising the Brothel City (Shahr-e Now) did help in reducing transmittable diseases; to the critics of the regime Reza Shah’s actions were efforts to enhance prostitution within a Shi’a state. Reza Shah’s commitment to a policy of centralization and mandatory military conscription gradually forced the government to face other more serious concerns. One such main issue was the sudden surge in the population of Tehran, caused foremost by an inflow of migrant population. With Tehran serving as a distribution point for the recruitment and transfer of soldiers, the size of Tehran’s red light district flourished. This further increased the health hazards of a hustling city with numerous communicable diseases. While poverty and harsh economic conditions was a prime cause that led many women to live in the Brothel City and engage in prostitution, the very fact that prostitution was declared illegal was a major drawback, preventing the government from providing proper care and action for those in need of medical care. The abuses of sex workers, long hours with low pay were issues over which the government had little supervision or control. At the beginning of World War II and the occupation of Tehran by the Allied Forces, the problem of the Red Light district was once again pushed into the foreground. The presence of Allied troops added further to the underlying tensions as well as to the spread of sexually transmittable diseases, particularly among foreign military forces and their interaction with the local community. The problem of Tehran’s Brothel City which at the beginning was associated with public health gradually shifted grounds and became a social enigma. Elements leading to the containment of prostitution, and the government’s policies towards prevention, cure, and rehabilitation of its residents from 1926 to the end of WWII are the primary objectives of the study.

This paper examines the way in which a woman marginalized by her madness, homelessness, and Romani ethnicity became both a popular legend and a symbol of civic identity. In 2007, the city government in Bursa, Turkey, undertook the near-total demolition of the Kamberler neighborhood and the eviction of its residents, most of whom were Romani. The park that replaced the neighborhood, Kamberler Historical Park, showcases ten busts of Ottoman sultans and several Ottoman-era buildings, linking the park with the AKP’s many neo-Ottoman architectural projects. A more surprising inclusion is the statue of a Romani woman nicknamed Deli Ayten, or “Crazy Ayten,” depicted carrying an assortment of colorful bags, a large drum, and a cümbüş (a banjo-like instrument). The actual Deli Ayten, Ayten Şenaşık (1953-1992), wandered the streets of Kamberler and the Bursa market for over twenty years and was so beloved by city residents that over three thousand people attended her funeral. A comparative analysis of the conflicting versions of her life story found in newspapers and a musical put on by the Bursa municipal theater leads to the identification of several shared themes, including madness caused by ill-fated love. Tracing these themes through Turkish and Middle Eastern historical sources and literary traditions, I show how her story lent itself to reconstruction as a myth. I then examine how and why this quasi-legendary figure became part of Bursa’s “brand,” promoted by the city through not only her statue and the musical but also a display in the city museum and a documentary film (scheduled for release in 2015). Finally, I suggest that the Deli Ayten narrative both complicates and supports the Bursa government’s construction of a neo-Ottoman identity.

This paper examines quality of life, stress, and insecurity in the West Bank, and how the core Palestinian value of sumud, or resilience, moderates the negative impact of the environment on these factors under sustained military occupation. The Palestinian Territories have experienced political instability and humanitarian traumas for nearly seventy years. Entire generations of Palestinians have grown up knowing nothing but conflict and occupation, with little indication that the status quo will shift in a positive direction in the foreseeable future. High levels of PTSD, anxiety, and other mental and physical conditions resulting from consistent stress and a fragile infrastructure have been reported in the Palestinian population. However, Palestinian society has managed to not only survive decades of obstacles and displacement, but also thrive at the grassroots level in terms of art, education and literacy, agriculture, entrepreneurship, and other sectors. To explain this disparity, Palestinians will point to the concept of sumud, which translates loosely into “steadfastness,” a sense of resilience that is built upon the fact that they still exist despite persistent struggle and continued expulsion. The shared narrative of Palestinian disenfranchisement, from the Nakba to the current siege of Gaza, occupation of the West Bank, and massive refugee population, has seemingly only strengthened this resilience despite mounting political, social, and economic obstacles. Using primary survey data, this population study assessed several components that contribute to quality of life, including insecurity and stress, in the West Bank. Results were compared with demographically similar participants from Jordan in order to capture the direct impact of the West Bank occupation. The results indicated that factors traditionally associated with poor outcomes in these contexts, such as low socioeconomic status, were surprisingly moderated in the participants, a finding that was further examined in follow-up field research, including interviews. I posit that the role of resilience as a core cultural value in the studied population, buoyed by factors such as social support and strong ideology, led to these unexpectedly high outcomes. The concept of sumud in Palestinian history will be described and applied to the Palestinian population of today. This study suggests that resilience can serve as a moderating factor in sustaining the motivation of vulnerable populations to overcome social obstacles and the consequences of political instability.

What is at political stake in birth? Control over birth is control over population, but birth is also the moment a person is constituted, when he becomes a political, legal, and social being. No wonder then that the efforts by the republic of France to govern and colonize the Islamic sultanate of Morocco (1912-1956) should ultimately become a battle over Muslim birth itself. The social history of French PMI (Protection Maternel et Infantile) programs in Morocco shows how medicine negotiates the line between the biological and the social. Traditional Muslim midwives mediated between Galenic, Islamic, and biomedical knowledge, a medical authority that Islamic law courts, state institutions, and physicians of the "high" philosophical medical tradition recognized. In the early protectorate period, Moroccan women enjoyed superior medical authority to French doctors--women diagnosed sickness, selected healers, prepared remedies, delivered babies, and provided medical testimony to Islamic law courts. To access the secluded Muslim woman, French medicine was first obliged to change genders and recruit French women to act as its medical intermediaries. The pioneer in Muslim women’s health, Dr. Francoise Legey, created the first maternity clinic for native women in 1927. When the French Protectorate state finally created maternal and infant health programs (PMI) for Moroccans on any scale (1948), it was to prevent nationalist revolution. Sociologist Robert Montagne argued that the Muslim patriarchal family was disintegrating and France could avoid revolution by acting as father to the new Muslim proletariat. The French extended the colonial welfare state to destroy the Muslim “mentalité;” a French-trained “muwallida” would replace the irrational "qabla" and refashion Moroccans into rational workers ready for colonial industries. But medicine has its own logics that operate beyond state ideology; practitioners and forms of knowledge have endured the rise and fall of colonial regimes. And a clinical epidemiology of birth allowed the reproductive Muslim body to speak--food for thought as the polities of North Africa and Egypt are publicly renegotiated through women's bodies in the contemporary Arab revolutions. The sources for this research are Islamic medical manuscripts, interviews conducted in Morocco 1998-2000 with midwives, physicians, nurses, and patients, French colonial archives, French medical journals, French medical monographs, and colonial medical ethnography.

Colonial powers in North Africa contributed to the introduction of a number of technological and institutional innovations that deeply influenced the development of post-independence governments, such as comprehensive mental health systems dealing with psychiatric practice in the region. In the specific case of Algeria, this network was administered by the central colonial government, who handled the creation of asylums to isolate mentally ill patients and the production of a theoretical framework for their medical practice. Moreover, the colonial administration dealt with the training of professionals who would be running these institution and would apply cutting edge psychiatric theories and therapies (Keller, 2007). This paper will argue that these factors - the establishment under colonial rule of mental institutions and the management of professional training in this medical field - contributed to the politicization of the Algerian colonial mental health system. This was also aided by the abuse of power at the hands of mental health professionals during the War of Independence, who, under directions from the French administration, used psychiatric tools to torture and segregate members of the resistance. This paper will also argue that, as a consequence of the politicization of the mental health system under colonial rule, after the decolonization process the network of institutions was left vulnerable and an easy target for the manipulation of the new government. The Algerian mental health system was therefore born as a politicised set of institutions, and continued to be so even after the end of the French administration. This paper will rely on a number of sources on colonial history and administration as well as those publications looking into colonial punishment and the relationship of power between the colonizer and the colonised, such as the work edited by Pierce and Rao (2006) on colonial punishment. Moreover, the paper will look into primary sources available at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer situated in Aix-en-Provence, providing data which will show the level of politicization of the system established in the early 20th century by the French government. This paper is based on research and fieldwork conducted as part of a larger and more complex doctoral project investigating instances of the political abuse of psychiatry within North Africa. Bibliography Keller, R. C. 2007. Colonial madness : psychiatry in French North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pierce, S. and Rao, A. ed. 2006 Discipline and the other body : correction, corporeality, colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.