Al-Tabib: Medical Knowledge Production and Exchange in 19th Century Levant

Abstract

Medicine, as many other fields, underwent a major transformation in the 19th century. At the turn of the century, there were four modern medical schools in the Ottoman Empire, two of which were in the Ottoman provincial capital Beirut. The Levant was a region of competition and penetration of different foreign powers and missionaries, and medicine lay at the heart of this competition. Missionaries established clinics, hospitals, and schools in the region, and their struggle for influence culminated in the establishment of the two medical schools. The Ottoman state also increased its regulation of medical and pharmaceutical practice, in an effort to gain control and curb missionary influence.

The native modern physicians were not passive actors in this fight for power. They negotiated and debated articles, new advancements, and theories, and engaged in local knowledge production. This thesis examines the way medical knowledge was transmitted in the Levant through the first Arabic medical journal, al-Tabib (1874-1914). The journal was not a tool for the dissemination of foreign medicine, but a site of local knowledge production and exchange. This thesis aims to show the changes in topics and interests, readership, and authors during the forty years of the journal’s publication, the development of the modern professional medical class, and how this transnational network of modern physicians disseminated and produced medical knowledge.