Health and Disease in Saudi Arabia:
The Aramco experience, 1940s-1990s

In June 1947 American medical entomologist Richard Daggy stepped off a plane in Dhahran onto a tarmac strip melting in the over-100-degree heat. The airport was a quonset hut separated from the runway by a sand dune. It had taken him several days of air travel to get there and he knew almost nothing of the famously private desert kingdom. He was sent there to help eradicate malaria, but there was only sand as far as he could see. “I was puzzled as to why a good, self-respecting malaria mosquito could make it in Saudi Arabia,” he recalled.

He joined a small group of doctors who were building a western-style health care system from scratch. Aramco’s original medical mandate had been to provide health care for their foreign workers, but it quickly grew to include local hires and their families, then everyone in the area. Basic health care for young, healthy adult workers quickly morphed into large-scale health initiatives to benefit the entire region and population. Diseases nearly eradicated in the US were still common in rural eastern Saudi Arabia. Infant mortality, malnutrition, malaria, tetanus, small pox, and trachoma took terrible tolls on the population.

Soon Daggy would be joined by his equally adventurous family and several other Aramco nurses, doctors, researchers, and epidemiologists who would become his colleagues. ROHO’s Carole Hicke interviewed more than a dozen Aramco medical professionals in 1996. Their experience spanned decades, from the early years after World War II when most of the local population were either nomadic bedu or oasis villagers, to the early 1980s when oil wealth had created modern cities, highways, and universities. Their stories capture unique perspectives of an isolated, old culture in transition and the doctors who moved half-way around the world equipped with little more than a sense of adventure to treat them.

This collection of interviews can be read online.

Our office conducted an earlier set of oral histories, “American Perspectives of Aramco, the Saudi-Arabian Oil-Producing Company, 1930s to 1980s” which can also be read online.

-- Julie Allen