Ph. D. Allan G. Hill B. A.’s research while affiliated with University of Aberdeen and other places

The Department of Occupational Health of the Ministry of Health of the Government of Kuwait was established in 1965. Its first Director came to Kuwait after long experience of occupational health in the United Arab Republic. Prior to this, the Kuwait Oil Company had established criteria for recognition and control of occupational health problems within its own preventive medicine division. Coincidental with the Government’s action the Company appointed its first full-time occupational health physician and technical assistant and over the next few years there developed close cooperation between Government and Oil Company, particularly within the field of the environmental health of petroleum workers. This was fortuitous but at the same time providential, for within a few years the Government itself entered the field of oil production with the establishment of the Kuwait National Petroleum Company, refining at Shuaiba and undertaking exploratory operations through its Spanish associates. Kuwait has presented a foretaste of industrial manning problems which are now being felt by other developing countries with small indigenous populations and large natural resources requiring expatriate labour forces to work them.

Despite the fact that Kuwait is still strictly speaking an arid zone country or indeed because of it, its atmosphere has long known pollution from particles of sand and dust, but owing to their relatively large size, greater than five microns in diameter, they have exerted no more than a nuisance effect. This explains the absence of silicosis in the animal and human dwellers of the deserts who breathe the silicotic particles throughout their life. The dry sand or dust laden air is, however, very irritating to the upper respiratory tract, causing dryness and crusting leading to universal habits of picking the nose, hawking and spitting. But the desert dweller still follows a sound custom which is now being discarded in the villages and towns, for during hot windy weather he uses the loose ends of his Khaffiya or headdress to wind round the lower portion of his face and neck as a protection: This has the two-fold effect of filtering coarse particles from the air he breathes and conserving the moisture from his lungs to increase the very low humidity of the air.

Urbanization is as old as civilization and equally complex. It is a continuing process with world wide manifestations, making comprehensive accounts of its causal factors and geographic occurrence as elusive as its factual definition. But urbanization is not a uniform process operating through time; with a time span extending from the Neolithic to the present day, and a geographic spread covering the entire occupied surface of the earth, almost any generalizations will be severely stretched to encompass even the salient aspects of such a process.

Kuwait, along with her neighbours, is the heir to some three hundred years of attempts, initially by the East India Company of England, to control the ravages of epidemic disease along the shores of the Persian Gulf. The history of these early struggles, which admittedly were primarily designed to allow the flow of trade to continue, is told in the next Chapter.

As a waterway linking Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley, the Persian Gulf was the scene of some of the earliest known voyages in the pre-Christian era. It was here that one of the world’s great trade routes developed, and perhaps it is not surprising when one reviews the inhospitality of its shores that it was the islands of the Gulf which predominated in the early phases of seaborne commerce, among the better known being Bahrain, Kharg and Hormuz. The evidence that Kuwait also had its portion of this considerable trade comes from the interesting excavations on Failaka Island in the mouth of Kuwait Bay. These have revealed Bronze-age dwellings suggesting the existence of a civilisation, probably Sumerian, some three thousand years ago. These people, together with the Elamites, the Egyptians, the Hittites of Anatolia and the Harrapan peoples of the Indus River Valley were the most ancient of all known civilisations. They were a non-Semitic people who originally occupied South Babylonia but gradually spread down to the Gulf to form a strong link with the Indus Valley nations.

“An asylum for the confinement of the insane was available in 1936, the main purpose of which was to keep the mentally sick from endangering the public and no regular treatment of inmates was really conducted.“ [1]

Kuwait’s economic development is not a history of steadily increasing wealth and prosperity. The State’s dependence on the entrepot trade of the Gulf and eastern Arabia laid it doubly vulnerable to political and economic factors largely beyond Kuwait’s control in both maritime and territorial realms. Just as the prosperity of the merchant community and its dependents in Kuwait saw successive periods of comfort and security, and then hardship and unease, so too did the growth of the city survive periods of growth and stagnation.

Eskimos live with reasonable comfort in sub-zero centigrade temperatures inside the Arctic Circle and Badu in the Arabian and North African deserts have survived for many hundreds of years living at the other extremes of temperature in excess of 50° Centigrade. Their secret is threefold; adaptability, controlled expenditure of energy and the development of a satisfactory micro-climate. Man, like other animals and plants but more successfully, has learnt to adapt as a study of the various arctic and desert inhabitants has shown, and they reveal many analogies. In the Arabian desert the above ground flora are xerophytic with long penetrating roots designed to reach the moisture deep under the sand while the leaves are xerophyllic, very tough and presenting the smallest possible surface to the abrasive winds. Many of them have at the same time developed thorns to discourage scavengers and enable them to survive. The animals on the other hand, are either burrowing or have developed remarkable powers for the conservation of fluid and electrolytes, and the loss of heat.

At the outset, Kuwait was considered as a small anomalous development in Eastern Arabia; in our present position it is apparent that several important principles emerge which have a bearing on a much wider range of situations throughout the world.

Urbanization is not a wholly continuous process; in the Middle East, certainly, as Adams [1] has shown for Iraq, phases of urbanization alternate with phases of “ruralization”. This and the next Chapter trace both relatively constant physical elements and more fluid historical and economic changes which have affected urbanization in Kuwait. These themes are then followed through to the present day and identify historical and contemporary phases of urbanization.