Modern Iranian Medical History through Stories and Memoirs with an Emphasis on the Second Pahlavi Era (1941-1979)

The present article has put forward the idea that contemporary Persian realist stories and memoirs contain rare or sometimes unique information about the medical developments in Iran during the transition from traditional medicine to modern medicine, during the modernization of medicine in the Pahlavi era. The author believes that, in Iran, most research performed in the field of medical historiography is based on medical sources and, more recently, on documents whose information gaps can be compensated by information obtained from other fields, such as literature and memoirs. Accordingly, the author has first tried to prove the authenticity and validity of this data for being used in historical research by proposing some theoretical frameworks. Then, by adopting an interdisciplinary approach and analytical method, the researcher attempted to extract the most important topics related to Iranian medical history based on the selected sources.