ʿAṣfūriyyeh (formally, the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane) was founded by a Swiss Quaker missionary in 1896, one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in the Middle East. It closed its doors in 1982, a victim of Lebanon’s brutal fifteen-year civil war.

The book uses the rise and fall of this institution as a lens through which to examine the development of modern psychiatric theory and practice in the region as well as the socio-political history of modern Lebanon. ‘Aṣfūriyyeh becomes a window into social-policy questions relating to dependency and welfare, definitions of deviance, the relation of mission to empire, state-building processes, and the relation of medical authority to religion.

Abi-Rached shows how ʿAṣfūriyyeh’s role shifted from a missionary enterprise to a national institution with wide regional influence. She offers a gripping chronicle of patients’ and staff members’ experiences during the Lebanese civil war and analyzes the hospital’s distinctive nonsectarian philosophy. When ʿAṣfūriyyeh closed down, health in general and mental health in particular became more visibly sectarianized—monopolized by various religious and political actors. Once hailed for its progressive approach to mental illness and its cosmopolitanism, ʿAṣfūriyyeh became a stigmatizing term, a byword for madness and deviance, ultimately epitomizing a failed project of modernity. Reflecting on the afterlife of this and other medical institutions, especially those affected by war, Abi-Rached calls for a new ethics of memory, more attuned to our global yet increasingly fragmented, unstable, and violent present.