Medical Education and the Making of Iraqi Doctors, 1869-1959
£24.99
About this book
Charts doctors and students as reformers, bureaucrats and subjects of social and cultural forces
- Delves into a hundred years of history to offer the first English monograph on the history of medical education in the modern Middle East
- Focuses particularly on Iraq, a sensational yet highly understudied region
- Situates social history in the emergence of medical institutions in late Ottoman, British occupied and mandated, as well as Monarchic and early Republican Iraq
- An extensively researched study that highlights a wealth of rarely consulted sources gathered from fourteen archives, family collections, medical journals, student newspapers, film, and oral interviews
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.
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.
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.
Medical Education and the Making of Iraqi Doctors is an excellent social and political history. It builds on an impressive corpus of sources, which Farhan reads with sensitivity and analytical sophistication, presenting her protagonists both critically and empathetically. Farhan’s narrative arc is well-grounded in Iraq’s social and political history but remains accessible to readers outside the field. For historians of medicine, it offers an excellent case study of the entanglement of medical education and class formation. For historians of the modern Middle East, it is a fine addition to the growing scholarship on the transformation of post-Ottoman elites in the Arab world.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Medicine, Professional Class Formation and Social and Cultural Change in Modern Iraq
Part I. Centripetal Labour, Centrifugal Professions: 1869 – 1921
Part I Introduction
1. The Institutionalisation of Medicine in Late Ottoman Iraq, 1869 - 1914
2. The Reconfiguration of the Medical Profession in Late Ottoman and British-Occupied Iraq, 1914 -1921
Part II. Competing Pedagogy: 1921 - 1935
Part II Introduction
3. Symbolic Capital and the Production of Medical Labour, 1921 - 1927
4. Colonial Pedagogies and the Legal Parameters of Medical Education, 1927 - 1935
Part III. “Doctors and Guerrillas”: 1932 - 1959
Part III Introduction
5. Pedagogies of Symbolic Violence and Professional Class-Making, 1932- 1949
6. Expanding Pedagogy and Competing Visions of Nationhood, 1941-1959
Conclusion and Epilogical Reflections
Bibliography
Appendix