Palestinian Doctors: Medical Practice and the Transformation of Palestine, 1900-1948

Palestinian doctors became a dynamic, vocal, influential, and fascinating professional community over the first half of the twentieth century, growing from roughly a dozen on the eve of World War I to 300 in 1948. This study examines the social history of this group during the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, examining their social and geographic origins, their professional academic training outside Palestine, and their role and agency in the country's medical market. Yoni Furas and Liat Kozma examine doctors' interactions with the rural and urban society and their entangled relationship with the British colonial administration and Jewish doctors. This book also provides an in-depth description of how Palestinian doctors thought and wrote about themselves and their personal, professional, and collective ambitions, underlining the challenges they faced while attempting to unionize. Furas and Kozma tell Palestine's story through the acts and challenges of these doctors, writing them back into the local and regional history.

About the Author

Yoni Furas is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa. Furas is the author of Write Down We are a Nation! Musa Kazem al-Husseini, a Political Biography (in Hebrew, 2017) and Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate (2020). He studies Palestinian social history and the history of Arab pedagogy.

Liat Kozma is the Harry Friedenwald Chair in the History of Medicine at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on the modern Middle East and the history of medicine in the region. Kozma is the author of Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011) and Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (2017).