Historians of Pahlavi Iran have demonstrated that physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and nurses were encouraged by early nation-builders to civilize patients and shepherd the masses into modernity. Medicine, however, was not only a top-down affair. Medical professionals maintained a dialogue with their patients, cognizant of the cultural mores of local communities and the threat of medical malpractice lawsuits. In fact, medicine, far from a universal science, was highly localized, inflected by traditional curatives (like herbs and spices), shortages of medical equipment and drugs, and local policing to safeguard patient rights. Through social history, scholars may examine the dialectic between patient and provider, which proved fundamental to the practice of modern medicine in Pahlavi Iran.

The Palestine Group was a loosely connected collection of young anti-Shah activists some of whom were arrested and tried publically in 1970 for the crime of acting against the Pahlavi monarchy and Iran's national security. Their plight became global, receiving support from anticolonial figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre. But while they played an important role in inspiring the revolutionary generation, in the historiography of the 1979 revolution and that of the global south, their story has been mostly forgotten. This article argues for remembering the Palestine Group by focusing on two facets of their prerevolutionary activism: the importance of a connection to the anti-imperial/colonial struggles that spread from “Asia to Africa”; and the centrality of maḥfilī politics (friendship circles) in addition to tashkīlātī (organizational) politics, which the historiography has traditionally emphasized. It demonstrates that as resistance shifted from maḥfil to tashkīlāt, it also shifted from a global struggle where Iran was one node out of many, to a nationalized struggle.