The field of Middle Eastern history began as an attempt to understand how Europeans came to dominate the region. As a result, when medicine and the environment were discussed, they were used to highlight European technological and scientific advances in these fields, and describe the processes through which Islamic medical and scientific concepts were replaced. The first wave of scholarship on the history of medicine in the region focused primarily on 19th‐century Egypt, where the state sponsored the development of a public health system to protect military readiness and combat epidemic diseases such as cholera and plague. This article highlights recent scholarship in the history of health, medicine, and the environment during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates how this lens (the “environmental‐medical turn”) provides new perspectives on the social and political history of the Middle East. I argue that the environmental‐medical turn provides a new avenue for locating illiterate members of society—the peasant and middle classes—in the archive; by exploring moments of crisis leading to protest and rebellion, and examining data revealing hardship and suffering, Middle Eastern historians can explore the complex roots of social and political events, and historians of medicine and the environment can include the region in transnational and comparative studies.

中文翻译：

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现代中东地区的公共卫生历史：环境医学的转折

中东历史领域始于试图了解欧洲人如何统治该地区。结果，在讨论医学和环境时，它们被用来强调欧洲在这些领域的技术和科学进步，并描述了取代伊斯兰医学和科学概念的过程。关于该地区医学历史的第一批奖学金主要集中在19世纪的埃及，埃及在该国赞助了公共卫生系统的开发，以保护军事战备和抵抗霍乱和鼠疫等流行病。本文着重介绍19世纪和20世纪初在健康，医学和环境历史上的最新研究成果，并说明了这一镜头（“环境医学转向”）如何为中东的社会和政治历史提供了新的视角。我认为，环境医学的转变为在档案馆中找到文盲的社会成员-农民和中产阶级-提供了一条新途径。通过探索导致抗议和叛乱的危机时刻，并检查揭示困难和痛苦的数据，中东历史学家可以探索社会和政治事件的复杂根源，医学和环境史学家可以将该地区纳入跨国和比较研究。