Health and Nation

Abstract

Abstract In the interwar years, the Egyptian medical profession emerged as a leading national middle-class project. Egyptian doctors asserted their professional identity as they competed with foreign doctors who practiced in Egypt, and they struggled to prove themselves as equal members in the international scientific community. They saw indigenous medical research on specific Egyptian problems as a sign of local competence and, moreover, as professional independence necessary for national one. This chapter offers a social and intellectual history of the Egyptian medical profession from the late nineteenth century to World War II. First, it argues that during the decades in which medical education in Egypt was declining under colonial rule, the Egyptian medical community rebuilt itself through education in many different medical schools abroad. Second, it describes how Egyptian doctors sought to integrate themselves into global scientific conversations and regional networks. Third, it demonstrates that Egyptian doctors struggled to prove their professional competence on the international scale by conducting research on and offering solutions to Egypt’s pressing problems: child mortality, obesity, prostitution, drug addiction, and more. Finally, this chapter suggests that the re-emergence of the Egyptian medical profession was, for the most part, an effendi male project, designed to cultivate both the self and its other—particularly middle-class women, and both male and female peasants.