*Originally recorded January 21, 2021*
Dr. Sara Farhan
Assistant Professor, Department of History
University of Northern British Columbia

Abstract: The 1958 violent overthrow of the Hashemite Monarchy of Iraq created a vacuum wherein various powers competed to dictate the country’s future all while medical diplomatic missions continued to operate along broader Arab nationalist sentiments. While the succeeding regime proved receptive to Soviet medical aid, it simultaneously reinforced Arab cooperation, and American dominance over the pharmaceutical industry in Iraq. In relying on the Iraqi Medical Archive, a depository rarely consulted by scholars, medical articles authored by Iraqi, Russian, American, Armenian and British doctors, Iraqi newspapers and memoires, oral interviews, WHO records, the National Archives at College Park, the National Archives at Kew Gardens, and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), this paper narrates the Iraqi chapter of a global history of medical diplomacy during the Cold War.

Speaker's Bio: I am a cultural and social historian of the modern Middle East. My publications have dealt with medicine, science and technology as well as broader questions on education, professionalization and colonialism, and the politics of archives and archiving. I received my Ph.D. from York University (2019) for writing a dissertation on medical education and health in modern Iraq. Since then, I taught at various universities in Canada and the Middle East. I teach a variety of courses on modern world history. These offering carry a wide range of themes including colonialism, nationalism, medicine and health, crime and criminality, intellectual history, among others.