Original air date: 28 December 2013 | Medicine is not merely a practice that takes place in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. It also involves the movement and operation of medical practitioners in different social spaces. In this episode, Anat Mooreville discusses traveling doctors in Israel/Palestine and their role not only in combating trachoma (a severe eye disease that causes blindness) but also as ethnographers and go-betweens within the framework of a Zionist national project.

Anat Mooreville is a doctoral candidate at UCLA studying the history of science and medicine in Israel/Palestine

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davidovitch, Nadav, and Shifra Shvarts. 2000. “Health and Hegemony: Preventive Medicine, Immigrants and the Israeli Melting Pot.” Israel Studies. 9, no. 2: 150-179.

Davidovitch, Nadav, and Zalman Greenberg. 2007. “Public Health, Culture, and Colonial Medicine: Smallpox and Variolation in Palestine During the British Mandate.” Public Health Reports. 122, no. 3: 398-406.

Feigenbaum, Arieh. Fifty Years of Ophthalmology in Israel [Hebrew]. Tel-Aviv: ha-Refuʼah, 1946.

Hirsch, Dafna. 2009. “‘We Are Here to Bring the West, Not Only to Ourselves’: Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine.” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 41: 577-594.

Sufian, Sandra M. Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Taylor, Hugh R. Trachoma: A Blinding Scourge from the Bronze Age to the Twenty-First Century. East Melbourne, Vic: Centre for Eye Research Australia, 2008.