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The history of medicine has undergone a set of iterations often embedded within the history of ideas (Henry Sigerist, Owsei), sociology of knowledge (Thomas Kuhn), and cultural history (Charles Rosenberg). Since World War II, politics has been an explicit and implicit feature leading to conversations about biopower (Michel Foucault), feminism (Judith Leavitt), Orientalism (Edward Said), and colonialism (Anne Marie Moulin). The recent historiography of medicine has shifted as analytical categories within local and global contexts has disrupted along the lines of the local vs. the global, center vs. periphery, and “Western” vs. “non-Western.” During the past decade, numerous scholars of science, technology, and medicine in colonial and postcolonial societies have adopted circulation as a useful lens of analysis. Our workshop seeks to move beyond a false dichotomy between circulation and power by examining the trajectory of medicine in the modern Middle East.

The Middle East has been and continues to feature within the global and globalizing processes insofar that it has been a site where capitalist, imperialist, and nationalist institutions have functioned as heuristics for power. We hope to look at the geographic transmission of medical knowledge from the late eighteenth century into the contemporary period. Medicine did not operate in isolation but was part of a shifting geospatial framework of the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism, and independent states. This workshop will unpack medicine and power by considering how the (re)production of medical knowledge and these local political formations dovetailed with broader global processes. Understanding how political and economic power operated within the framework of knowledge production and the in the Middle East shows how knowledge migrated to proximate regions in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Consequently, we hope that the workshop will investigate the production and circulation of medical knowledge, highlighting issues of translation, expertise, and mediation or competition between knowledge traditions. More broadly, we seek to probe the conditions of possibility of the globality of knowledge and its various formations. To that end, this workshop aims to make visible the transnational, intersecting, and dynamic histories of medicine and health in the modern Middle East and beyond. Second, we aim to respond to an ongoing trend in the study of science, technology, and medicine that depoliticizes knowledge and reinforces socially constructed boundaries between knowledge and society against which the field developed. By looking at the Middle East—a region disrupted by dynamics of imperialism, state formation, decolonization, the Cold War, civil wars, authoritarianism, popular uprisings, and mass immigration—we can better address the depoliticization and the archaeology of knowledge.

This workshop aims to explore diverse disciplinary backgrounds on topics such as the geography of disease, translation, sexology, psychiatry, labor, race, medical taxonomies, and medical technologies.  Several issues will be addressed, notably: the production and circulation of medical knowledge, highlighting issues of translation, expertise, and mediation or competition between knowledge traditions. More broadly, we seek to probe the conditions of possibility of the globality of knowledge and its various formations. To that end, this workshop aims to make visible the transnational, intersecting, and dynamic histories of medicine and health in the modern Middle East and beyond.

The workshop is convened by Edna Bonhomme, Shehab Ismail (both Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte), and Lamia Moghnieh (EUME Fellow 2017/18 & 2019-20). It is organized in cooperation with the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

The keynote lecture by Omnia El Shakry on April 11, 2019 is open to the public. For the individual panels (not the keynote), please register via event_dept3(at)mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de by March 1, 2019.

Participants:

Gülhan Balsoy Erkaya (Istanbul Bilgi University)
Soha Bayoumi (Harvard University)
Edna Bonhomme (Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
Elise Burton (Newnham College)
Hannah-Louise Clark (University of Glasgow)
Jennifer Derr (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Omar Dewachi (Rutgers University)
Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Christopher Dole (Amherst College )
Chris Gratien (University of Virginia)
Cihangir Gündoğdu (Istanbul Bilgi University)
Sherine Hamdy (University of California, Irvine)
Lisa Hellman (Freie Universität Berlin)
Shehab Ismail (Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
Nazan Maksudyan (Freie Universität Berlin / Centre Marc Bloch)
Lamia Moghnieh (EUME Fellow 2017/18 & 2019-20)
Nora Parr (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)
Omnia El Shakry (University of California, Davis)
Sherene Seikaly (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Bhrigupati Singh (Fellow of the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin 2018/19 / Brown University)
Chris Wilson (University of Cambridge)
Seçil Yilmaz (Franklin & Marshall College)
Asli Zengin (Brown University)

Program

April 11th 2019

10:00: Introductory remarks by convenors

10:30- 12:30: Circulation, Borders, & Interruptions

[Movement is integral to many of these disease, peoples, and concepts; What are the dynamics that causes people/diseases/ medical technologies to move and cause interruption?]

Chris Wilson. “Border-Crossing Patients in the History of Psychiatry in British Mandate Palestine”
Michael Christopher Low. “Microbial Mecca and the Global Crisis of Cholera”
Sherene Seikaly. “Bones and Molars: An Arab in Baltimore”
Edna Bonhomme. “Settlers First: Infections, Medicine, and Labor in Colonial Libya”
Commentator: Lisa Hellman

12:30- 1:30pm:  Lunch

1:30-3:30 pm: Competition, Laboratories, and the Contested Geographies of Medicine

[How does knowledge get contested and and politicized? What gets transferred in the process and what does not?]

Omar Dewachi. “Science Patronage and the Making of Mandatory Medicine in Iraq”
Elise Burton. “The Viral Coup: The Iranian Pasteur Institute and Medical Research after Mosaddegh”
Seçil Yılmaz. “During Pasha's Laboratory: Syphilis and Empire in the Late Ottoman Countryside”
Lamia Moghnieh. “The Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders: Psychiatry, Subject and Society in Lebanon”
Commentator: Hansjörg Dilger

3:30-4:00: Coffee

4-6pm: Keynote Lecture by Omnia El Shakry

6pm: Dinner

April 12th 2019

9:00:-11:00: Managing Bodies

[How do people and states govern bodies through moral and legal measures? What happens when bodies are managed through medical discourse?]

Hannah Louise Clark. “Algeria’s Other Arab Doctors: Jewish Lives and Livelihoods in Algeria under French Colonial Algeria”
Nefertiti Takla. “Political Economy and the Medicalization of Illicit Substances in Egypt, 1914 - 1939”
Gülhan Balsoy Erkaya and Cihangir Gündoğdu. “Medicalizing Death in the Late Ottoman World”
Commentator: Edna Bonhomme

11:00-11:30: Coffee

11:30-1:30pm: Framing Objects of Knowledge

[How do objects get framed by medical practitioners? How do experts and professionals make novel terms, organs,  that shame disease, therapeutics, or death?]

Chris Gratien. “Tropics of the Taurus: German Medicine and Malaria in the Ottoman Empire during WWI”
Shehab Ismail. “German and Egyptian Sexologists and the Boundaries of the Sexual Instinct: Early Twentieth-Century Encounters”
Jennifer Derr. “The Liver in Egypt”
Commentator: TBA

1:30-2:30: Lunch

2:30-4:30 pm: Trajectories of Medicine in the Contemporary Middle East

[How do researchers who study the contemporary period write about disease and medicine in the present]

Christopher Dole. “Experiments in Scale: Overcoming the Limits of Psychiatry in Post-Disaster Turkey”
Ana Vinea. “On culture, Suitability, and Reform: Egyptian Psychiatry in Times of Political Transformation”
Asli Zengin. “Science of Sexual/Gender Transgression in Turkey: A Transnational Approach”
Sherine Hamdy & Soha Bayoumi. “Nationalist Discourse and Medical Practice in Post-Revolutionary Egypt”
Commentator: Bhrigupati Singh

5-6:30: Syntheses and Conclusions