EPIDEMICS AND GLOBAL HISTORY The Power of Medicine in the Middle East Dr. Edna Bonhomme Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for History of Science
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n August 2018, the World Health Organization reported that cholera has infected 120,000 people in Yemen. Survivors and victims, alike, have had to endure varying degrees of the symptoms: diarrhoea, dry mouth, low blood pressure, muscle cramps, and death. Situated in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen heralds as a country bound with aromatic Mokha coffee, centuries of coastal trade, and most recently the target of a Saudi-led war. The political tensions of the Middle East have generated a particular kind of crisis whereby hundreds of thousands of people are subjected to a double bind - the tragedy of war and the upsurge of an epidemic. Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera, has been isolated since the 1800s and its cure has been known since the following century. The disease is one of many that have been the harbinger for epidemics in the Middle East. Yet, that history is connected to a global transformation in medicine, sanitation, and capitalism since the early nineteenth century. The current cholera epidemic in Yemen can be understood in a vacuum with a myopic account focused on disease incidence and prevalence, or it can be interpreted through a broader lens, one that considers the various historical, political, and commercial actors that shape medicine and health. The history of modern medicine in the Middle East is inseparable from the “global” insofar that these practices have a wide geographical and conceptual reach. Recent discussions about the term “global” have been problematized and disrupted in history of science along the lines of the local vs. the global, centre vs. periphery, and “Western” 9
