Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq

by Omar Dewachi

Iraq's healthcare has been on the edge of collapse since the 1990s. Once the leading hub of scientific and medical training in the Middle East, Iraq's political and medical infrastructure has been undermined by decades of U.S.-led sanctions and invasions. Since the British Mandate, Iraqi governments had invested in cultivating Iraq's medical doctors as agents of statecraft and fostered connections to scientists abroad. In recent years, this has been reversed as thousands of Iraqi doctors have left the country in search of security and careers abroad. Ungovernable Life presents the untold story of the rise and fall of Iraqi "mandatory medicine"—and of the destruction of Iraq itself.

Trained as a doctor in Baghdad, Omar Dewachi writes a medical history of Iraq, offering readers a compelling exploration of state-making and dissolution in the Middle East. His work illustrates how imperial modes of governance, from the British Mandate to the U.S. interventions, have been contested, maintained, and unraveled through medicine and healthcare. In tracing the role of doctors as agents of state-making, he challenges common accounts of Iraq's alleged political unruliness and ungovernability, bringing forth a deeper understanding of how medicine and power shape life and how decades of war and sanctions dismember projects of state-making.

Genres: History, Anthropology

299 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 1, 2017

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Analysis of how Iraq population health and medical professionals are determined by fragmented healthcare system under international sanctions, damaged infrastructure, biopolitics and state-making and war; also how those factors creating new problems for global health. It really broadens my perspective how improving population health is complex especially in special settings like conflict-affected states.

[Layla Ren · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author was once a medical student in Iraq and later became a medical anthropologist after studying in Europe and North America. From a medical perspective, the book traces a century of Iraqi history since the beginning of the mandate period.

The first four chapters focus on “imperial medicine.” Iraq’s healthcare system took shape amid the brutality of the Mesopotamian campaign during World War I. Imperial physicians gradually came to realize that Iraq was not a “tropical” environment, and through institutions such as the Royal Medical College and overseas training programs, a local medical workforce was cultivated. The mass vaccination campaigns for pilgrims traveling to Karbala and Najaf are particularly striking.

My favorite sections are Chapters Five and Six, which cover the period after 1958. Building on the international development momentum of the postwar monarchy, Iraq expanded cooperation with the Soviet bloc, achieving significant improvements in primary healthcare and education. During the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, targeted interventions against diarrheal disease sharply reduced infant and child mortality—an exemplary case of development under wartime conditions.

Unfortunately, decades of progress were undone by prolonged warfare and international sanctions. Once one of the most medically advanced countries in the Middle East, Iraq now sees large numbers of doctors emigrating, while patients are forced to seek treatment in Lebanon. The book also touches on rural-to-urban migration, and the transformation of “Revolution City” into today’s Sadr City is particularly poignant.