Book Description:
Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia offers a history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Pursuits of health created shifting boundaries of rule between imperial officials, indigenous elites, and local populations, and health policies compelled scientists and administrators to categorize fluid populations and ambiguous territorialities. As a discourse, health facilitated notions of racial difference, opposing native uncleanliness to white purity and hygiene, and indigenous medicine to modern science. Placing health at the center of political and social change, this book weaves the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula into global circulations of commodities and movements of people.
