An essential principle of health posited by the modern Iranian middle class since its rise at the dawn of the 20th century was a strong link between a healthy body and a sound mind. This thesis was built on a reinterpretation of the maxim, aql-i salīm dar jism-i sālim ast (a sound mind lives in a healthy body), which drew on modern Western biomedical sciences, specially neurophysiology. Rather than mirroring a simple history of transfer of knowledge (from a creative West to a passive East), this maxim tells a fascinating, multifaceted story of acculturation. Indeed, the general thesis at the base of the present text holds that biomedical sciences were adapted in interaction with problems seen to be created by, and conditions believed to be necessary for, Iran's modernization (tajaddud). Shifting the focus of modern Iranian medical history to the intricate interplay between global and internal contexts and forces, this thesis maintains that these interactive patterns were directed at physical, mental, and moral health and disease. They thereby formed a strategy to “medicalize” modernization, addressing its central problem: how to accelerate it without causing social order to collapse, and thus to propel Iran into the ranks of the “civilized nations.” This novel strategy rose in the context of the modern middle class's distress about the chaos surrounding the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and the failure of its political focus to advance progress—that is, the belief that change is conditioned on science-driven sociocultural reforms. It was embedded in international colonial structures of scientific knowledge and political power yet, at the same time, was decisively shaped by internal problems. The content of biomedical sciences and medicine was adopted from Western countries. But their contextual objective—the management of modernization—though drawing on late-19th-century Western “medical model(s) of cultural crisis,” was decisively geared to meet Iran's specific circumstances.