שימוש בגופות מתים לצרכי לימוד והוראה בבית הספר לרפואה ממוסגר במחקר ההיסטורי, הסוציולוגי והמשפטי בישראל כויכוח בין זרמים חילוניים ודתיים. מצדו האחד של המתרס, ניצב הממסד הרפואי המזוהה עם ליברליזם, קידמה ונאורות, ומצדו השני – הממסד הדתי המזוהה עם ההלכה ומתנגד לקידמה המדעית שניתוחי הגופות מייצגים. שלא במפתיע, היבטים הקשורים בזכותם של המתים ובני משפחותיהם על גופם, נעדרים כליל מהוויכוח, או מוצגים ככלי רטורי שמסתיר אג'נדה דתית-הלכתית. בשונה, מאמר זה מתמקד באופנים דרכם הופקעה האוטונומיה של החיים והמתים על גופם והעברתם לבית הספר לרפואה של האוניברסיטה העברית בשנים 1967-1950.

In the interwar years, the Egyptian medical profession emerged as a leading national middle-class project. Egyptian doctors asserted their professional identity as they competed with foreign doctors who practiced in Egypt, and they struggled to prove themselves as equal members in the international scientific community. They saw indigenous medical research on specific Egyptian problems as a sign of local competence and, moreover, as professional independence necessary for national one. This chapter offers a social and intellectual history of the Egyptian medical profession from the late nineteenth century to World War II. First, it argues that during the decades in which medical education in Egypt was declining under colonial rule, the Egyptian medical community rebuilt itself through education in many different medical schools abroad. Second, it describes how Egyptian doctors sought to integrate themselves into global scientific conversations and regional networks. Third, it demonstrates that Egyptian doctors struggled to prove their professional competence on the international scale by conducting research on and offering solutions to Egypt’s pressing problems: child mortality, obesity, prostitution, drug addiction, and more. Finally, this chapter suggests that the re-emergence of the Egyptian medical profession was, for the most part, an effendi male project, designed to cultivate both the self and its other—particularly middle-class women, and both male and female peasants.

This article examines the durability of high postmortem examination rates in Israel between the 1950s-1980s. Previous studies overlooked the issue of medical authority and the social history of autopsy, focusing on policy, technological development, and conflict between science and religion. By contrast, our analysis brings together the medical interest in unlimited research of dead bodies and the power relations between doctors and subaltern groups in Israel. Based on the Israeli State Archives, the Hebrew University Archives, and the daily press, we argue that medical biopolitical aspirations and the public shaped the history of postmortem examinations in Israel. High rates were embedded in the medical construction of doubt regarding the cause of death that only physicians could resolve by autopsy. Civilian protests led to a temporary decrease in the 1960s, while political and medical intervention brought about a gradual resurgence in postmortem rates in the 1980s.

The selection of nineteenth-century Arabic texts on medical education, medicine and health demonstrates the significant link between the revival of the Arabic language and literary culture of the nineteenth century, known as the nahda, and the introduction of medical education to the Ottoman Empire. These include doctor Ibrahim al-Najjar's autobiographical account of his studies in Cairo (1855), an article by doctor Amin Abi Khatir advising on the health and care of infants (1877), questions and answers in the major popular Arabic journals al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf (1877–1901) and an article about a new tuberculosis treatment by doctor Anisa Sayba‘a (1903). Taken together they contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up production, reproduction and reception of global scientific knowledge, as well as to a social and intellectual history of science. We argue that the engagement with science during the nahda was a multi-vocal and dialogical process, in which doctors and patients, journal editors and their readers, negotiated the implications of scientific knowledge for their own lives and their own society. The texts of the original documents and their translations can be found in the supplementary material tab at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000413.

Historians of the professionalization of medicine in colonized regions, including the Middle East, have mostly focused on male practitioners, whereas histories of women in the medical professions are mostly centered in Western societies. The present issue examines histories of female medical practitioners by looking at case studies spanning the twentieth century from Algeria, Palestine, Israel, Iran, and Iraq. The introduction to this issue offers an overview of existing scholarship and charts sources and directions for future research and historical actors yet to be studied. The articles examine microlevel contact zones, in which women’s agency shaped and was shaped by colonial and postcolonial encounters, decolonization, and the formation of national professions. They reveal tensions within the medical sphere, between men and women, foreign and local, colonizer and colonized.

The article analyzes the gendered experience at Hebrew University Medical School in its first two decades, 1950–70. Contrary to earlier studies on women in medicine, which focused on immigrant doctors to late Ottoman and mandatory Palestine, gendering the future cadre of doctors in post-1948 Israel has not been discussed. Based on archival documents, newspapers of the period, and interviews with the school’s graduates, the article argues that the school maintained a consistent though informal quota policy, which also differentiated between country-born and immigrant students. It examines students’ interactions with the school, beginning with their decision to apply for medical school and going through the interview process, the experience of student life, and their attempts to balance medical school with marriage and motherhood.

From 1961-1965, the Medical School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem taught four cohorts of medical students from developing countries, mostly African. This article explores the program through the theory of hospitality. First, we find that hospitality is constructed and enabled by international interests. Second, those interests build a status which has unexpected consequences that reveal sorts of hosts, welcoming and xenophobic. Third, as an outcome of the international structure of student exchange, the guests' response to the terms of hospitality was mitigated by their privileged status as international medical students. On the one hand, they appreciated Israel as a model of post-colonial state-building; on the other, they criticized the racist reactions to their presence.

This article examines policies adopted by the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (CTW) toward Europe’s Middle Eastern and South Asian colonies. It argues, first, that, under the pretext of protecting women from traffic, the CTW provided colonial powers with justification to monitor and restrict the international mobility of women traveling alone. Second, it demonstrates that the League adopted colonial racial assumptions about the sexuality of colonized women, and thus perceived them as less deserving of protection from forced prostitution. Third, it argues that the CTW thus helped perpetuate and justify differential treatment of foreign and indigenous women in Europe’s overseas colonies. The article relies on the CTW’s protocols, on the traveling commissions it initiated, on country reports to the League, and on protocols of the conferences it initiated dedicated to traffic in women in the “East.”

Following World War I medical discourse and practice increasingly concentrated on the ability to contain and channel the sexuality of young men on the move. This article examines how colonial and international authorities in the interwar period sought to contain the presumed damages resulting from soldiers’ and sailors’ interaction with prostitutes. As mobile men, this article argues, they had largest potential to carry microbes and parasites to their next station or port of call. As low-ranking soldiers or workers, they could be effectively policed and monitored. Within their military or labor hierarchies, they were subjected to measures that could not be applied to the general population. Finally, lower-class men were a convenient other for the emerging middle class and its dream of sober, hard-working men and respectable families. This article first zooms in to three examples of British and French attempts to contain venereal disease and hence the sexuality of lower-class men: British-colonized Egypt and Palestine, and French-colonized Morocco. It then turns to sailors, whose sexual interactions and their medical consequences became a matter of international policy, as embodied in the International Labor Organization. This article follows several sites – ports, BMCs and ex-pat entertainment venues, as nodes of mobility, and the ways in which different authorities tried to monitor the encounters created between prostitutes and patrons, North African and European bodies, soldiers and civilians, humans and germs.

During the final years of Ottoman rule and the three decades of British rule, Palestine witnessed the emergence of a community of professionally trained Palestinian Arab doctors. This study traces the evolution of the medical profession in Palestine against the background of the shifting cultural and symbolic capital of an expanding urban middle class and the educational possibilities that enabled this development. Palestinian Arab doctors are examined through a number of interconnected prisms: their activity in social, political, and professional regional networks, their modus operandi under British colonial rule, their response to Zionism and its accompanying influx of immigrant Jewish doctors, and their ability to mobilize collectively under a shared national vision.