Until fairly recently, Arab women rarely received professional health care, since few women doctors had ever practiced in Arabia and their culture forbade them from consulting male doctors. Not surprisingly, Dr. Mary Bruins Allison faced an overwhelming demand when she arrived in Kuwait in 1934 as a medical missionary of the Reformed Church of America. Over the next forty years, "Dr. Mary" treated thousands of women and children, faithfully performing the duties that seemed required of her as a Christian—to heal the sick and seek converts. These memoirs record a fascinating life. Dr. Allison briefly describes her upbringing and her professional training at Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She then focuses on her experiences in Kuwait, where women of all classes, including royalty, flocked to her care. In addition to describing many of her cases, Dr. Allison paints a richly detailed picture of life in Kuwait both before and after the discovery of oil transformed the country. Her recollections include invaluable details of women's lives in the Middle East during the early and mid-twentieth century. They add a valuable chapter to the story of modern medicine, to the largely unsuccessful efforts of the Christian church to win converts in the Middle East, and to the opportunities and limitations that faced American women of the period. Dr. Allison also worked briefly in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and India, and she includes material on each country. The introduction situates her experiences in the context of Middle Eastern and medical developments of the period.

In the late nineteenth century, medical educators intent on transforming American physicians into scientifically trained, elite professionals recognized the value of medical school design for their reform efforts. Between 1893 and 1940, nearly every medical college in the country rebuilt or substantially renovated its facility. In Building Schools, Making Doctors, Katherine Carroll reveals how the schools constructed during this fifty-year period did more than passively house a remodeled system of medical training; they actively participated in defining and promoting an innovative pedagogy, modern science, and the new physician. Interdisciplinary and wide ranging, her study moves architecture from the periphery of medical education to the center, uncovering a network of medical educators, architects, and philanthropists who believed that the educational environment itself shaped how students learned and the type of physicians they became. Carroll offers the first comprehensive study of the science and pedagogy formulated by the buildings, the influence of the schools’ donors and architects, the impact of the structures on the urban landscape and the local community, and the facilities’ privileging of white men within the medical profession during this formative period for physicians and medical schools.

Volume 30 recounts the eighty-year-long history of the RCA's mission work in the Middle East, written by a missionary who has spent decades in the Arabian Gulf. Including instructive discussion of missiological themes as well as the narrative of the church's daily work in Arabia, this volume is not only of denominational interest but will also provide important insights for mission students and those actively involved in a mission field.

"Will shape our thinking about America and the Middle East for years."--Christopher Dickey, Newsweek

A detailed study of the role of religious worship and spiritual affairs in women's lives in the twentieth-century Arab world.

The lives of the Western women who lived, worked and travelled in Arabia in the first half of the 20th century have been largely ignored by historians. Penelope Tuson tells the stories of these women. Sometimes flamboyant and unconventional, sometimes conservative and conformist, all of them wanted in some way to be a part of British imperial life. Some were prepared to "play the game", others were not and could even be regarded as difficult and dangerous. "Playing the Game" explores how these women negotiated power and position in the Empire and how conventional female roles were defined by the masculine perspecitves and hierarchies of imperial authority, often with the collusion of the women themselves actively, but also sometimes despite their attempts to subvert the stereotypes.

An exploration of the modern history of Bahrain and its international relations, Joyce investigates the country's relations with the US, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the USSR. Placing today's events in context, she covers the history of tension between Sunni and Shia Bahrainis and concludes with the still-unfolding events of the Arab spring.