UCLA

The dissertation considers how a wide range of actors—including physicians, scientists, hospitals, aid organizations, governments, and the public—understood the infectious eye disease trachoma and deemed eye health salient from political, economic, scientific and cultural perspectives in Palestine and Israel from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. Even though the causative agent was not isolated until 1957, there was a strong consensus at the beginning of the twentieth century that poverty, unhygienic practices, and ignorance facilitated trachoma. This etiology allowed Jewish ophthalmologists to construct it as a disease that was receptive to biological, cultural, and social interventions. My dissertation explores the design and implementation of Jewish anti-trachoma efforts; how physicians produced biomedical discourses on trachoma that were entangled with cultural constructions of the Arab East; and the wide set of transnational developments and relationships that configure the story of ocular expertise in Israel.

Using a wide array of state and organizational archival papers, memoirs, and scientific publications, this study investigates what it meant for trachoma to be considered a “disease of the Orient” throughout three political regimes in Palestine and Israel, and the social, ethnic, and political tensions the presence of trachoma raised about who was modern. During Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, trachoma treatment instigated questions about the boundaries between Jews and Arabs, Middle Eastern Jews and European Jews, physicians and auxiliaries, biomedicine and folk remedies, and the health of the eye and the health of the nation. In the postwar period, when trachoma nosedived as an Israeli public health priority, trachoma instead illuminates how Jewish organizations and the State of Israel utilized their ocular expertise to make their mark on the Third World through technical solutions embodied as development aid, both to Jews in North Africa and non-Jews in sub-Saharan Africa. The history of trachoma not only highlights how important ophthalmology was in conceptualizing public health in the Middle East, but also creates new sites of global medical inquiry by linking Zionist social welfare practices, international Jewish philanthropy and postcolonial medical diplomacy.