This course provides a broad thematic overview of the history of medicine and public health in the Middle East. Focusing on the modern period, the course highlights the region as a contact zone of medical traditions and a key site in the emergence of colonial medicine and international public health. Students examine the social and cultural effects of new developments in medical thought and practice, including ideas about contagion and disease prevention, the notion of public health and hygiene, and the construction of colonial and postcolonial medical schools and hospitals.