This panel provides a historical perspective on how physicians, healthcare workers, patients, and administrators negotiated the meanings and locations of health in the modern Middle East. Rather than presenting a linear narrative of medical development that anticipated the present status of the healthcare system, we delve into health through the lens of hospitals, with each panelist offering a perspective on various dimensions of these institutions. This panel traces the movement of medicine that developed through mediation, negotiation, and conflict in a particular context. We investigate how medical ideas and practices circulated through the regional movement of patients, and transnational movements of knowledge, personnel and investment. In this panel, we consider the transformation in medical practice and institutions from the late-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, through the plethora of stakeholders and actors participating in local, regional and global networks.

Dana Nabulsi will present “Missionaries and the Making of the Native Modern Physician in 19th century Levant” which considers how American missionaries competed with other foreign powers, the Ottoman state, and locals in shaping medical practice, institutions, and the emerging native modern professional class of physicians. Soheila Ghaziri, in “Medical Tourism in the Interwar Levant: Patient Mobility Across Class and Space,” focuses on how medical care, distances and movement influenced patients’ choices in selecting their treatment facilities. In “Southern Hospitality: The Baptist Hospital of Gaza, 1954-1967,” Carter Barnett presents a biography of a medical institution defined by the intersectional healthcare politics of local authorities, refugee patients, Baptist physicians, Egyptian administrators and UNRWA sponsors. Hratch Kestenian will expand the conversation by commenting on the afterlife of Ottoman and European colonial medicine in the modern Middle East.

These presentations grapple with the history of healthcare and medical institutions in the Middle East to comment on how they were shaped, transformed, and contested. The collapse of the healthcare system in Gaza cannot be viewed as an isolated event, the result of a targeted campaign since October 7th, but rather in its historical context, at the contested intersections of colonial and local interests. The same applies for the modern healthcare system of the Levant. Beyond medicine, this panel takes an interest in the cultural and social history of hospitals by paying attention to the people who defined them.