The history of public health in the modern Middle East: The environmental–medical turn

Abstract

The field of Middle Eastern history began as an attempt to understand how Europeans came to dominate the region. As a result, when medicine and the environment were discussed, they were used to highlight European technological and scientific advances in these fields, and describe the processes through which Islamic medical and scientific concepts were replaced. The first wave of scholarship on the history of medicine in the region focused primarily on 19th‐century Egypt, where the state sponsored the development of a public health system to protect military readiness and combat epidemic diseases such as cholera and plague. This article highlights recent scholarship in the history of health, medicine, and the environment during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates how this lens (the “environmental‐medical turn”) provides new perspectives on the social and political history of the Middle East. I argue that the environmental‐medical turn provides a new avenue for locating illiterate members of society—the peasant and middle classes—in the archive; by exploring moments of crisis leading to protest and rebellion, and examining data revealing hardship and suffering, Middle Eastern historians can explore the complex roots of social and political events, and historians of medicine and the environment can include the region in transnational and comparative studies.