A Thread of Life: Mahbub al-Mahmud and Medical Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Morocco

The medical auxiliary Mahboub al-Mahmoud (Tangier, 1888-ca. 1970) remains a neglected figure in the history of Morocco's medical modernization. However, his life and professional trajectory can provide a fruitful standpoint from which to question the persisting nationalist bias that has pervaded the modest postcolonial medical historiography about that farthest corner of North Africa. Mahboub's multiple mobilities-temporal, social, geographical, professional-transcend the "colonial fractures" created by the complex European partition of Morocco, which have resulted in Moroccans playing no significant role in the narratives of the origin and development of modern medicine in the country. This paper is divided into three sections, each of which deals with a distinctive phase of Mahboub's itinerary, his connections with various groups of irregular medical practitioners, and the modernizing initiatives they embodied from the times of Hassan I's late nineteenth-century reforms to the rise of Moroccan anticolonial nationalism in the 1930s.