Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt

"Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt" investigates the use of medicine as a 'tool of Empire' to serve the state building processes in Egypt by the British colonial administration, which effectively transformed Egyptian medical practice and medical knowledge in ways that were decidedly gendered. The book unfolds its arguments by focusing on the changes brought by British reforms to two pre-colonial Egyptian institutions: Qasr al-Aini and the School of Midwifery. Under British rule, and mirroring the structure of similar institutions in London, these two previously independent schools were brought into a single hierarchical medical program in which Qasr al-Aini was given primacy. This meant that Qasr al-Aini, which only admitted males, dispensed the highest levels of medical training to men, while students in the School of Midwifery, who had previously trained as 'doctresses' (hakimahs), were now restricted to studying the subordinate fields of midwifery and nursing. Women medical professionals, in other words, were trained to be doctors' assistants and medical caretakers and therefore saw their social status decline despite colonial modernity's promise of progress. The book shows how the introduction of colonial medical practices ultimately gendered Egyptian medicine in ways that privileged Egyptian men and masculinity. By relegating Egyptian women - whether as midwives or as housewives - to maternal roles in the domicile, colonial medicine was determinative in diminishing what control women formerly exercised over their profession, their homes and their bodies through its medical dictates to care for others, for the sake of the nation. Thus, by interrogating how colonial medicinal was constituted, "Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt" reveals how the rise of the modern state determined the social formation of native elites in ways directly tied to the formation of modern gender identities, and gender inequalities, in colonial Egypt.