medicine and modernity in the middle east and north africa

Int. J. Middle East Stud. 44 (2012), 799–807doi:10.1017/S0020743812000931

REVIEW ARTICLE

Nancy Gallagher

MEDICINE AND MODERNITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

AND NORTH AFRICA

HIBBA ABUGIDEIRI, Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt (Burlington,Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011)

NARIN HASSAN, Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility(Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011)

RICHARD KELLER, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: The Universityof Chicago Press, 2007)

ANNE MARIE MOULIN and YESIM ISIL ULMAN, eds., Perilous Modernity: History of Medicinein the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East from the 19th Century Onwards (Istanbul: IsisPress, 2010)

MIRI SHEFER-MOSSENSOHN, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions (Albany, N.Y.:State University of New York Press, 2010)

SANDRA SUFIAN, Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine,1920–1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

In recent decades historians specializing in the Middle East and North Africa have studiedendemic and epidemic diseases as well as evolving medical and public health knowledgeand policy to better understand major historical transformations. The study of genderand empire, class and ethnicity, and civil society and government in the determinationof medical and public health policy has yielded new insights into questions of statepower, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, modernity, and globalization. Historianshave asked why, when, and how Western medicine took root in Muslim societies, whichhad their own complex and longstanding medical traditions.

In the early modern era, new understandings of scientific knowledge led to the sys-tematic study of natural phenomena and to new ideas about disease control. Colonialor tropical medicine aimed to advance the study of diseases unknown in the West andtheir prevention and cure. In Muslim majority societies, Galenic-Islamic, prophetic, andcustomary medical systems competed with and sometimes complemented new medicalknowledge and practice. Colonial authorities and local rulers feared endemic and espe-cially epidemic diseases that could depopulate whole regions, leading to a decline in

Nancy Gallagher is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara,Santa Barbara, Calif.; e-mail: [email protected]

© Cambridge University Press 2012 0020-7438/12 $15.00

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the number of laborers and therefore revenue. For this reason, they actively sought newpreventative and curative medical interventions. Advocates of empire often justified theirimperial ventures by arguing that Western medical intervention improved the health ofthe colonized. During the imperialist era of direct colonization, medicine became a toolof empire that facilitated the penetration of local societies. Over time, Western-trainedmedical practitioners, indigenous or foreign, gained moral authority over indigenousbodies, which now were controlled and regulated by state public health policy. Doctorsand police enforced new laws that regulated women’s reproductive capabilities, soldiers’bodies, the vaccination of children, and the incarceration of the physically and mentallyill.

The books under review illustrate these trends in the social history of medicineand suggest new directions for further research. I review the books chronologically byhistorical period.1 The first book, on Ottoman medicine from 1500 to 1700, sets thestage for the encounter with Western medicine. The second, an edited volume, addressescomplex and often elusive questions of modernity in the Ottoman Empire and the MiddleEast. The third and fourth books take up questions of gender, empire, and nationalismin medical reform in Egypt, Syria, and India. The final two books discuss the politics ofmalaria eradication in British Mandate Palestine and the treatment of mental illness incolonial North Africa.

Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, by Miri Shefer-Mossensohn,contains four well-researched chapters on preventative and curative medicine, healthand illness, medical charity, and medical institutions. Her sources are the records ofthe ruling elite in the three Ottoman capitals of Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul: waqfendowment documents, annual reports of waqf foundations, firmans, medical treatises,travel accounts, t.abaqat (biographies), and miniatures illustrating medical scenes. Sheexplains that the Ottoman Empire was comprised of diverse cultures with medicalsystems that both complemented and competed with one another. Medical practicesvaried from region to region and were predictably more elaborate for the wealthy thanfor the poor. As elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe, humorism (the Hippocratictheory that a person’s temperament and health are influenced by an excess or deficitof four bodily fluids: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) underlay medicalunderstanding. To restore the humoral balance and bring the patient back to goodhealth, the author explains, Ottoman physicians generally began with dietary adjustmentsfollowed, if necessary, by medication. Surgery was high risk and only a last resort.Religious or prophetic medicine was based on hadith and was widely practiced amongall classes. Customary or popular medicine, unlike humoral and prophetic medicine, didnot derive from a written tradition; it was much used among the non-elite because itentailed inexpensive home-based remedies rather than compound medicines and otherinterventions prescribed for the elite. The three systems were often used simultaneously;physicians and patients alike were willing to try humoral medicine, religious medicine,and customary medicine in hopes that something would prove effective.

For the Ottomans, Shefer-Mossensohn informs us, human beings were at the center ofthe universe and custodians of the natural world. They should both use and maintain theworld that God created and aspire to maintain all forces—physical, material, spiritual,and divine—in a cosmic balance. The Ottomans were great sponsors of medical aid andother forms of charity. Assisting the sick was a religious duty incurring the gratitude

Medicine and Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa 801

and obligation of the recipients and thus in turn helped reinforce existing hierarchiesas well as social harmony. Ottoman authorities preferred to found hospitals and otherinstitutions of public welfare in the centers of major cities, where populations weredense and the need was concentrated. The facilities in Istanbul were especially large andwell designed, with tranquil gardens and spectacular views.

The author explains that medical and food aid were generally dispensed on the basesof social standing and vocation. Travelers without family nearby might seek care inhospitals, which perhaps in part explains why most patients, according to the existinghospital records, were Muslim men. There was, however, at least one hospital, locatedin Cairo, exclusively for women. Women closest to the sultan were greatly restrictedin medical care; the male physician was not allowed to speak with them or to examinethem directly, and surgeons were not allowed to treat them at all. Woman medicalhealers, however, were able to serve the women of the palace. Shefer-Mossensohncautions that the Ottoman concept of balance should not be confused with the Westernconcept of holistic medicine. For Ottoman healers, the human body must be understoodas existing in both a physical and a spiritual environment. Physical health and mentalhealth were closely related: when one was out of balance, the other would be as well.Physicians therefore tried to bring the patient back to balance by considering externaland internal elements. Music was considered a particularly effective treatment: hospitalssometimes had a pavilion where musicians could serenade patients with music selectedfor their particular medical conditions. Water was also viewed to be therapeutic, andmost hospitals contained a hammam, or bath, where the patient’s humoral balance couldbe restored. A wide variety of foods and amulets were also used for preventive andcurative purposes. Ottoman authorities were not in agreement about the existence ofcontagion. They built hospitals near mosques, which might afford protection againstmiasmas, but generally did not isolate the physically or mentally ill from the healthy,with the exception of lepers. The wealthy often fled plague-sicken areas, but most stayedput and trusted in providence.

In the introduction, the author tells us that she chose to focus on the period from 1500to 1700 because it covered the transition from medieval Ottoman to modern medicine.At the beginning of the era, hospitals were typically part of larger complexes (kulliye)that were endowed by Ottoman elites and included mosques, soup kitchens, and otherbenevolent institutions. At the end of the era, new hospitals were modern stand-alonefacilities with larger and more specialized medical personnel. The author tells us thatthe empire was very diverse, as were its medical systems, but generally treats Ottomanmedicine as a single system. We do not learn about Greek Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian,or Jewish medical traditions, though they may have been of great importance in someareas. Were there other religious medical traditions similar to Prophetic medicine? Shealso states that medicine was to be a prism through which she would reconstruct socialand cultural realities. Although we learn a great deal about Ottoman medicine and health,we do not get a sense of the wider social and cultural realities or how they changed overtime.

In her conclusion, Shefer-Mossensohn states that Ottoman medicine was distinctfrom Galenic-Islamic medicine in general because scholars wrote in Ottoman Turkishrather than Arabic and because hospitals took on the characteristics of the Ottomanbureaucracy and hierarchy. She then asks if Ottoman medicine was “successful.” She

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argues that the Ottomans took preventive medicine very seriously and that it was veryeffective. This might be a topic for future research. When illness did occur, the sickbelieved in the ability of physicians and their medicines to heal them but realizedthat medical treatments often failed. Physicians were paid less than religious scholarsin medreses; many physicians were from Jewish, Greek, Armenian, or other minoritycommunities, perhaps, she suggests, because of the relatively low status of the profession.This explanation seems contradictory, however, because the author has already told usearlier in the book that physicians were held in high esteem; perhaps the physician’ssocial standing varied by time and place. In her final comment, she observes thatOttomans accepted illness and death as part of the life cycle; physicians and medicinewere not expected to cure all but rather to do no harm. Again, this seems to contradictthe author’s earlier statements about popular views of medical efficacy.

Ottoman Medicine is a well-written and richly detailed monograph that will becomea standard source for specialists in Ottoman and medical history. It is the first socialhistory of Ottoman medicine in English and is written in a delightfully accessible style.As the author states, it is not the final word on Ottoman medicine and society but ratherbrings together in one compact monograph much information that points the way tofurther research.

Anne Marie Moulin and Yesim Isıl Ulman ambitiously title their edited volumePerilous Modernity: The History of Medicine in the Ottoman Empire and the MiddleEast from the 19th Century Onwards. It is based on the proceedings of a conference heldin Istanbul (no date given). In their introduction, “The Particular Place of Medicine inthe Debate on Modernity and Modernization in the Middle East in the 19th and the 20thCenturies,” Moulin and Ulman lay out the central arguments of the collection: that thehistory of medicine, more than that of other fields of knowledge, enables historians tochallenge the notion of an unbridgeable divide between East and West; that moderniza-tion is ongoing; and that modernity is “a permanent quest for solving the global issues ofscience, society, and power” (p. 21). The volume’s articles, which are for the most partoriginal and interesting, tend to be short research papers in English or French that maketentative suggestions for further research, the sorts of papers given at conferences forcomment and scholarly exchange. We get titles such as “Some Methodological IssuesConcerning the Sciences at the European Periphery,” “Some Preliminary Thoughts aboutthe Tanzimat and the Idea of Nature,” and so forth. Despite the title of the book, notall the articles focus on medicine; I will focus on those dealing with medical history,the topic of this review essay. M’hamed Oualdi, in his article, “Du hakim renegat aupraticien europeen: Mutations d’identite des medecins de cour et modernization duservice rendu aux beys de Tunis, du milieu du XVIIe siecle au milieu de XIXe siecle,”shows that the status of Italian and French doctors who practiced medicine at the courtof the Regency of Tunis improved over time. In the 17th century, European physiciansin Tunis would have been expected to convert to Islam, but by the mid-19th century thiswas no longer the case. Rather, they were becoming more independent and gaining instatus. When the bey had a European physician thrown into prison and bastinadoed inthe early 19th century for announcing an outbreak of plague, public opinion roundlyopposed the punishment.

In “Glimpses of Relationships between Hospital, State, and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” Hormoz Ebrahimnejad considers the meaning of modernization in the


history of medicine in Islamic countries. In Iran, reformers attempted to modernizemedicine by adapting old institutions to new conditions. In medieval times, medicalstudy took place in madrasas rather than hospitals. On the basis of an anonymousmanuscript written in the 1860s that advocated clinical examination and twenty-four-hour on-duty doctors at hospitals, Ebrahimnejad asks why such reforms happened inthe 19th century. He suggests that the reason was the centralization of power and theaccompanying expansion of the military—in short, the advent of the modern nation–state.

In “Medical Modernization in [the] 19th Century Ottoman Empire with Special Ref-erence to the Introduction of Roentgen Rays in Turkey,” Yesim Isıl Ulman discussesthe introduction of x-ray technology into Ottoman medicine by young physicians whohad studied foreign medicine. Nuran Yildirim, in “Les mesures de quarantaine prisespendant les epidemies de cholera et leurs repercussions sur la societe ottoman (1831–1918),” explores efforts by Ottoman authorities to control cholera. In “Les quarantainesau Moyen-Orient: Vecteurs ambigus de la modernite medicale (XIXe–XXe siecle),”Sylvia Chiffoleau shows the extent to which Ottoman quarantines and lazarettos wereonerous and porous. Anne Marie Moulin, in “Changeante modernite: L’etat egyptienet la modernization de la sante publique (19e–20e siecles),” looks at the modernizationof public health in 19th-century Egypt and asks about the nature of modernity, againhighlighting the stated theme of the volume. Nadav Davidovitch and Zalman Greenberg,in “Smallpox and Variolation in a Village in Palestine in December 1921: A Case Studyof Public Health, Culture, and Colonial Medicine,” utilize a trove of documents andphotos to show how villagers in Dawaimeh, near Hebron, reacted when British Mandateauthorities attempted to forcibly vaccinate them against smallpox, which had broken outin the village. The inhabitants, who were used to variolization (inoculation with a smallamount of smallpox variola to minimize the severity of the disease or to induce immunityto it) and did not trust the methods or the intentions of the British authorities, made franticefforts to hide their children, even in caves. In “Sorrow and Illness: ‘Modern’ Expressionof Death in Ottoman Muslim Epitaphs of the 19th Century,” Edhem Eldhem finds thatOttomans more easily expressed their individual sentiments in Ottoman Muslim epitaphsas modernity freed them from “the restraints and controls imposed by the Islamic tradi-tion” (p. 206). Finally, Claire Beaudevin, in “Une medecine moderne ‘coupee du passe:L’exemple de l’echographie obstericale au sultanat d’Oman,” explores the introductionof ultrasound and evolving concepts of the fetus in contemporary Oman.

The volume is in serious need of editing. The arguments in the introduction, inparticular, are often obfuscated by syntactical problems. The publisher should have askeda good editor to go over the manuscript before it appeared in print. And a conclusionsummarizing the authors’ views on medicine and modernity would have been helpful.Still, the articles demonstrate the often novel and imaginative new research currentlybeing undertaken in the social history of medicine in the Ottoman Empire and the MiddleEast.

Narin Hassan, in Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and ColonialMobility, states that the goal of her book is to use medical history to study developments“such as the rise of domestic management, emerging notions of sanitation and cleanli-ness, progress, and the growth of textual and scientific knowledge as crucial to notionsof modernity” (p. 18). She focuses mostly on Victorian-era British women travelers to

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Syria, Egypt, and India but begins with Lady Wortley Montagu’s account of her stay inIstanbul from 1716 to 1718. In Istanbul, Montagu, as wife of the British ambassador, wasinvited into elite Ottoman women’s homes and was much impressed by their hospitalityand customs. She learned of the practice of variolization and had her son inoculated.She herself had survived the disease in London and when she returned home introducedvariolization to her circles. Her account of her trip greatly influenced later British womentravelers who also sought access to local women’s private lives,

Hassan explains that in the 19th century, British women travelers to the MiddleEast and India often learned to treat themselves and their families with medicines theyhad brought with them. A few then began to treat local women and their families,thereby gaining unprecedented access to local domestic life and a higher status thanwas possible at home. Some of these women, who were not medically trained at all,called themselves “doctresses” to enhance their medical authority. In Egypt, Lady LucyDuff-Gordon, wife of Alexander Duff-Gordon, a well-known British civil servant andbaronet, established herself as a great healer of rural inhabitants and later happily workedunder the direction of a European-trained Egyptian physician. She adapted to Egyptianculture, was befriended by a local Egyptian family, and elected to spend the remainderof her life in Egypt. Isabel Burton, wife of Richard Burton, was an untrained medicalhealer who treated twenty to fifty patients a day in Syria for simple ailments.

In India, British women doctors, mostly trained in medical schools at home, gainedprofessional experience and built relationships with local women, some of whom werealso educated in Western medical schools. British, Middle Eastern, and Indian womendoctors became advocates of reforms such as the expansion of female education, newmedical and public health systems, and restrictions on child and forced marriages.They were also, according to Hassan, agents of empire, whose access to private familiesenabled them to present a positive image of imperial power and serve as useful mediators.

Memoirs of these women were wildly popular in Victorian England, and Britishnovels glorified the British women “doctors” who treated natives and found adventureand romance abroad. A number of Middle Eastern and Indian women doctors trained inWestern medicine also wrote memoirs; Hassan briefly mentions several in an epilogue.Again, this might be a topic for another study.

Hibba Abugideiri begins her book, Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine inColonial Egypt, by explaining that British reformers in late 19th-century Egypt broughtthe school for women medical practitioners (h. akıma), founded by Muhammad Aliin 1832, under the authority of the all-male Qasr al-�Aini medical school, founded byMuhammad Ali in 1827. The new British-appointed all-male faculty taught male studentsthe practice of medicine. The male faculty also presided over an all-woman facultythat trained the female students in the practice of midwifery and nursing only. Britishauthorities appointed British physicians and administrators to the highest positions, whileEgyptian physicians remained at the lower ranks; many of the Egyptian physiciansbecame active in the nationalist movement. As Abugideiri comments, after nominalindependence was won in 1923, Egyptian physicians formed the Egyptian MedicalAssociation and, following both colonial and patriarchal patterns, reserved the mostlucrative fields for themselves, consigning Egyptian women medical workers to remainat the lowest levels. Egyptian physicians advocated training women to manage theirhomes scientifically, arguing that women should learn modern ideas of hygiene in order


to raise healthy children. Doctors exhorted women, especially those who were pregnantor nursing, to eat healthfully and exercise daily. They came to consider themselves asthe scientifically educated guardians of women’s health, reproduction, and sexualityand accordingly the defenders of Egypt’s moral identity. Both Hassan and Abugideiriare much influenced by historians of gender and empire such as Fred Cooper, AnnMcClintock, Mary Louise Pratt, and Ann Stoler.

Sandra M. Sufian, in Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Projectin Palestine, 1920–1947, explains that during the British Mandate era in Palestine,Zionist physicians and engineers believed themselves to be rescuing the land of Palestinefrom disease. Their efforts would save Jews from the unhealthy ghettos of Europe andbring them to Palestine, where they would build healthy bodies by farming the newlyreclaimed land. Sufian tells us that because they thought diseases from the “natives”might be dangerous, Zionist leaders encouraged mandate authorities to enact publichealth policies that would remove “natives” from the land and separate them from theZionist settlers. In the view of the Zionists, the indigenous population was backward,unproductive, and without real attachment to the land.

Sufian relates that the Zionist colonizers considered malaria, which was prevalentin parts of the country, to be caused by neglectful agrarian practices of the indigenouspopulation, whose watering holes and leaky irrigation ditches made ideal places formosquitoes to breed, rather than by a natural environmental problem. The Zionistscalled for the removal of the Palestinian Arab peasants from the land that they had longused for pasture and to which under Ottoman law they held traditional grazing rights.The Zionist leadership then claimed that because they had drained the swamps and poolsto eradicate the mosquitoes and thereby redeemed the land, they were entitled to replacethe Palestinian Arabs with Zionist immigrants.

Palestinian Arabs, with their own sense of national identity and well aware of Zionistintentions, tried to counter Zionist claims that they were backward or that they neglectedtheir land. Among them, according to Sufian, was Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, a Palestinian Arabwho was a prominent physician before and during the Mandate era and who lecturedabout malaria in German and English to scientific audiences. In a report to the Mandatoryauthorities, Canaan stated that Palestinian Arabs carried out their own swamp-drainageprojects and worked as laborers in government malaria-control projects. Palestinian Arablandowners distributed quinine to their workers and supervised the drainage projects.They were, Canaan argues, quite able to take care of their land and their communitiesaccording to modern public health guidelines. When Zionist authorities claimed that theirown efforts had improved the health of Palestinian Arabs, Canaan countered that thehealth of Arabs had begun to improve well before the Zionist projects began, that the mainimprovements in health were in Arab communities farthest from the Zionist settlements,and that Zionist settlements had no effect at all on the decreased infant mortality rateof Arabs anywhere in Palestine. Sufian’s well-researched book demonstrates the closeconnections between disease, colonization, and nationalism.

In his complex and nuanced study, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French NorthAfrica, Richard C. Keller explains that French psychiatrists at the turn of the 20th centurycame to North Africa to study and practice in what they considered an experimental spaceoutside the bounds of civilized metropolitan society. French colonial authorities heldthat Morocco, unlike France’s other territories in North Africa, was to be ruled indirectly,

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with indigenous institutions functioning alongside modern ones for Europeans. Frenchpsychiatrists accordingly advanced a dual standard: substandard mental health facilitiesfor Moroccans and modern ones for Europeans. French colonial authorities contrasteda maristan (from the Persian, bimaristan, a hospital often for the mentally ill), wheremental patients were in chains, with a French-built psychiatric hospital founded in1920, where patients were housed behind locked doors with tiny windows for frequentinspection. Keller observes that Moroccan patients had been liberated from their chainsbut were now housed in a harshly alienating prisonlike institution.

In Tunisia, according to Keller, Guy de Maupassant visited the Sadiki hospital in 1887and wrote eloquently about its horrors. Many other French writers wrote similar sensa-tional and terrifying accounts of their visits to maristans or other mental hospitals; suchaccounts were extremely popular with the reading public. Antoine Porot, a progressiveand reform-minded French psychiatrist who had practiced general medicine in Tunisiasince 1907, urged colonial authorities to establish an asylum designed especially forTunisian patients, both for their own good and for public safety. He further argued thatthrough medicine France could extend its penetration into its colonial territories. Theproject was repeatedly stalled because settler leaders were reluctant to approve fundsfor Tunisians, but construction finally began in 1927.

In 1925, Antoine Porot moved from Tunis to Algiers to take up a chair in psychiatryat the medical faculty. He lobbied to build a state of the art psychiatric hospital forMuslims that was suited to the culture, economy, and geography of North Africa. Likethe asylum in Tunisia, the projected hospital was considered expensive, particularly bysettler officials, but was finally approved and opened in 1930 as a showpiece to celebrateand advertise France’s beneficence to its colonies during the centenary of the 1830conquest of Algiers. With Porot as its central figure, Algiers became a major centerof psychiatric study. The “Algiers school of psychiatry” argued that Algerians wereneurologically inferior because of the stunted evolution of the cerebral cortex.

Keller observes that unquestioned assumptions about the inferiority of the nativeunderlay the “Algiers school of psychiatry” that Porot founded. Since the 19th century,French settlers had considered the indigenous peoples to be inherently fatalistic, super-stitious, debilitated, amoral, violent, and pathological because of their climate and race.French psychiatrists absorbed these views and assumed that North African Muslimswere not compatible with more “civilized” settlers, so the two communities had to beseparated, especially in hospitals. Keller argues that even progressive psychiatrists withutopian visions, like Porot, were (perhaps unwittingly) an integral part of a militantlyracist colonial order. Colonial authorities forcibly confined many Algerians to asylumsfor being drug or alcohol abusers or nationalist activists. Algerian Muslims understoodthat the asylum was a locus of state control and avoided committing themselves andtheir relatives in it unless absolutely necessary.

Keller also discusses Franz Fanon and other interrogators of the colonial encountersuch as Albert Memmi and Kateb Yassine. Fanon had pointed out that by prohibiting thesale of medical supplies to Algerians, using doctors and psychiatrists as torturers, andrequiring physicians to report the wounded, the French turned medicine into a weaponduring the Algerian Revolution. After independence in 1962, French-educated Muslimstaff physicians were promoted, and new physicians were trained. French-educatedAlgerian psychiatrists began to challenge the racist stereotypes of the colonial era.


In postindependence Tunisia, in a formerly French hospital that had fallen into decay,French-trained Tunisian reformers had patients remove their confining doors, introducedart and dance therapy, and opened a market where patients could sell agricultural productsto the local community. They sought common ground where doctor and patient couldmeet on equal footing. This method would not have worked in colonial times, when thegoal was to preserve a hierarchical order and the privileges of the settler community;and it resulted in a happier, safer, and more efficacious medical facility.

Taken together, the books reviewed here illustrate new directions in the social historyof medicine. In addition to bringing together extensive information, Ottoman Medicineexemplifies how medicine and public health can be used as a prism on the early modernera, pointing the way for further research. Perilous Modernity offers new views onmodernity and medicine as well as new sources, from x-rays to epitaphs. DiagnosingEmpire and Gender and The Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt build on thework of earlier historians to show how women and gender impacted the developmentof modern medicine in Egypt. The final two books, Healing the Land and the Nationand Colonial Madness, demonstrate that in the only two settler societies in the region—Palestine and Algeria—unquestioned notions of superiority enabled the colonizers toinflict great injustices on the indigenous peoples. In both cases, the local populationsappropriated and adapted the public health and medical policies of the colonizers as aform of resistance.

N OT E

1I previously reviewed Hibba Abugideiri’s book in American Historical Review 117 (2012): 3; SandraSufian’s book in H-Levant H-Net Reviews, 2008, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=22850; andRichard Keller’s book in International Journal of African Historical Studies 40 (2007): 534–36.

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