Alison Shan Price MBE
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society FRGS
Alison Shan Price is the Founder and CEO of the multicultural One World Actors Centre and a historian specialising in the history of human narrative through interculturalism in the Middle East. It is at the centre of her academic research, presentations, bilingual and Living History productions, and workshops in Kuwait and the UK. This lecture is the seventh
in a series on the role of Western women travelling through, living and working in the pre-oil nineteenth and early twentieth century Near/Middle East
Dr Eleanor Calverley (1887-1968): Khatun Halima, the first Western lady doctor in Kuwait
Circa 1911, after the successes of the American Mission hospitals in Basra and Bahrain, a sister hospital was opened in Kuwait at the invitation of Sheikh Mubarak al Sabah, Mubarak the Great. Dr Eleanor Calverley was the Kuwait Mission’s first lady doctor. Travelling by donkey, in extreme conditions, to make house calls to women who could not come to the hospital or be seen by male doctors, she bridged the cultural gap between traditional healthcare and new Western medical methods. Dr Calverley opened a dispensary and, later, the first hospital for women on the site which is today the Dar al Athar al Islamiyyah Amricani Cultural Centre
