Egyptian women and the science question: Gender in the making of colonized medicine, 1893--1929

Beginning with Great Britain's colonial takeover of Egypt's School of Medicine and adjoining hospital in 1893 until its return to Egyptian hands in 1929, this study examines how Anglo-Egyptian medical discourse constructed a trope of the “modern Egyptian woman.” By cautiously applying a paradigm derived from Western gender and science as well as postcolonial cultural theory, this foray argues that parts of Victorian science, particularly those aspects that treated woman's biological nature, were culturally “translated” into Egyptian medical discourse. Thanks to Victorian science's ready-made authoritative discourse on woman, Egyptian medical professionals found in colonial medicine a scientific pretext on which to base their nationalist calls for “republican motherhood.”; As evidence to this discursive exchange in gender values between Victorian and Egyptian medicine, this study examines both the colonial reforms of Egyptian medical institutions and well as the turn-of-the-century Egyptian press. Through analysis of curriculum, governmental documents, medical treatises, periodicals, travel literature, and memoirs, this treatise argues that Egyptian medical institutions underwent a process of Anglicization, creating for the modern Egyptian doctor an unprecedented level of socio-political authority. Paradoxically, unlike the empowered Egyptian doctor, the process of medical professionalization displaced the Egyptian professional midwife within the newly emerging medical hierarchy. Furthermore, through discourse analysis of popular medical journals, it was discovered that, through the modern authority of the Egyptian doctor, Egyptian medical discourse constructed new medicalized definitions of female domesticity, or republican motherhood. Protected by Science, these new gender values—or rather, old ideas of domesticity now rationalized by modern medicine—were presented by this discourse as the only legitimate way to be “modern,” and for Egypt to modernize. This study, then, demonstrates how the female body is peculiarly the arena in which struggles other than the woman's own have been waged.