Medical Education And The Making Of Iraqi Doctors, 1869-1959

By (author) Farhan, Sara
Short description/annotation:
Charts doctors and students as reformers, bureaucrats and subjects of social and cultural forces
Description:
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.
Description:
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.
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
Review quote:
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 a