Overview

This book offers a rigorous social and cultural history of the formation of medical professionals in modern Iraq and their role in shaping public health institutions. Tracing developments from late Ottoman medical reforms to the establishment of the Medical College of Mosul, the book examines the institutionalisation of medical education as a critical element of the social transformation of Iraq. It reveals how shifting imperial, colonial and national frameworks sought to cultivate a cadre of physicians who would serve state and society. These experts, however, often found themselves navigating competing ideological imperatives. This extensively researched study highlights a wealth of rarely consulted sources gathered from 14 archives, family collections, medical journals, student newspapers, film and oral interviews. Drawing on these materials, it interrogates the contradictions inherent in state-driven efforts, wherein doctors functioned as agents of reform and subjects of bureaucratic oversight. Through this, Sara Farhan reveals the nexus between medical pedagogy, professional authority, public health policy and the broader political transformations that continually redefined medicine in Iraq.

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9781399553285

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Reviews

Through covering both late Ottoman and Iraqi history as well as using exceptionally rich sources including interviews, Farhan demonstrates how medicine was a contested field of empire- and (colonial) nation-building, and how physicians in Iraq became both instruments of state power and agents of resistance. A fascinating sociopolitical study relevant for historians of MENA and beyond.--Cyrus Schayegh, Geneva Graduate Institute

Through covering both late Ottoman and Iraqi history as well as using exceptionally rich sources including interviews, Farhan demonstrates how medicine was a contested field of empire- and (colonial) nation-building, and how physicians in Iraq became both instruments of state power and agents of resistance. A fascinating sociopolitical study relevant for historians of MENA and beyond. -- Cyrus Schayegh, Geneva Graduate Institute

Through covering both late Ottoman and Iraqi history as well as using exceptionally rich sources including interviews, Farhan demonstrates how medicine was a contested field of empire- and (colonial) nation-building, and how physicians in Iraq became both instruments of state power and agents of resistance. A fascinating sociopolitical study relevant for historians of MENA and beyond. -- Cyrus Schayegh, Geneva Graduate Institute Sara Farhan’s Medical Education and the Making of Iraqi Doctors, 1869-1959 offers an in-depth study of the complex connection between the professionalization of medicine and the transformation of the modern Iraqi state. Uncovering a trove of archives, it deftly unravels the deep interrelationships between medicine, public health and competing claims to modernize and develop the state under Ottoman, then British mandate, and finally, national rule. A must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between modern education and the state or knowledge and power in the modern Middle East. -- Marwa Elshakry, Columbia University

Author Information

Sara Farhan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Trained as a social and cultural historian, her research esteems medical education, disease and diplomacy, the politics of science and technology, and archive and archive keeping. Her work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies; British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies; Social History; Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World; Alternative Routes and Left History.

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