Approaching the history of an Egyptian biomedicine

Abstract

This piece explores the history of medicine in Egypt, the roots of an Egyptian practice of biomedicine in particular, through its historiography. In the period after World War II, the term “biomedicine” came to describe a practice of medicine defined by the close relations among clinicians, biological laboratory research, and the pharmaceutical industry in Europe and the United States. The history of medicine in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa has long possessed close links to that in regions of Europe. In Egypt too, biomedicine has deep historical roots shaped by the influence of the nineteenth‐century Ottoman‐Egyptian state, the experience of colonialism, and the anti‐colonial objectives of the post‐colonial Egyptian state in the second half of the twentieth century. These influences were particularly important in relation to the treatment of schistosomiasis, one of Egypt's top‐ranking health problems of the twentieth century. The history of schistosomiasis demonstrates the gaps in the historiography of medicine in modern Egypt as well as how we might begin to consider the emergence of biomedical knowledge and theory at sites in Global South.