Medical Education and the Making of Iraqi Doctors, 1869-1959 - by Sara Farhan (Hardcover)

About the Book

Charts doctors and students as reformers, bureaucrats and subjects of social and cultural forces

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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