Disorder and Diagnosis
Disorder and Diagnosis offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents—hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often excluded from histories of this region—Laura Frances Goffman demonstrates how the Gulf and its Arabian hinterland served as a buffer zone between "diseased" India and white Europe, as a space of scientific translation, and, ultimately, as an object of development.
In 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. As a collection of institutions and infrastructures, pursuits of health created shifting boundaries of rule between imperial officials, indigenous elites, and local populations. As a set of practices seeking to manipulate the natural world, health policies compelled scientists and administrators to categorize fluid populations and ambiguous territorialities. And, as a discourse, health facilitated notions of racial difference, opposing native uncleanliness to white purity and hygiene, and indigenous medicine to modern science. Disorder and Diagnosis examines how Gulf residents, through their engagements with health, fiercely contested and actively shaped state and societal interactions.
—Elise Burton, University of Toronto
"Disorder and Diagnosis is a pioneering social history of the Arabian littoral of the Persian Gulf. Laura Goffman convincingly demonstrates that disease and public health were central to political projects and imaginaries, and illustrates how medical history is an illuminating lens to trace mobility and connectivity even prior to the oil boom of the 1970s."
—Arang Keshavarzian, New York University
"Laura Goffman takes us on a medical tour across the Gulf region and centers the experiences of everyday people in a clear, cogent, and captivating narrative. Challenging nationalist historiographies,showing a rich panorama of approaches to health, this is a brilliant addition to the history of medicine, disease, and the body in the modern Middle East."
—Beth Baron, The City University of New York
"[A] compelling work that fills a notable lacuna in the historiography of medicine, empire, and state formation in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. The book is elegantly argued and offers a rich and multilayered analysis of how medicine operated as a tool of imperial control and a site of local resistance and negotiation. Disorder and Diagnosis is an indispensable resource for scholars and students alike."
—Sara Farhan, American Historical Review
"Laura Frances Goffman's Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia is an important addition to the growing body of literature on the history of health, medicine, and disease in the modern Middle East. Importantly, Goffman's book... reframes the modern history of the Gulf in ways that raise issues that are relevant to broader debates in the global history of health, medicine, and disease."
—Isacar Bolaños, H-Sci-Med-Tech
"Disorder and Diagnosis should be a 'must-read' on every reading list dealing with the Arabian Peninsula, with the social history of the Middle East, and, last but not least, with women and gender in the Arab world."
—Nora Derbal, Journal of Arabian Studies
"Laura Frances Goffman's Disorder and Diagnosis is an important new contribution to the field of the history of medicine and disease in the Middle East. Its strength lies not only in the gaps it fills in our understanding of the medical history of the Arabian Peninsula, but also in its methodological sophistication."
—Pallavi Das, Review of Middle East Studies
"Goffman's new book Disorder and Diagnosis is an impressive and compassionate study of the historical changes and continuities in the lives of ordinary people in modern Arabian society that came with medical interventions between the late nineteenth century and the oil boom of 1973."
—Beverly Tsacoyianis, History: Reviews of New Books
