As some of you may know, I am a Marxist Herstorian (and also GEW union member) who has been researching and writing about medical and scientific practices in North Africa from the eighteenth century to the present. I am co-organising a workshop entitled “Power in Medicine: Interrogating the Place of Medical Knowledge in the Modern Middle East” which will take place in Berlin 11-12 April 2019. My co-organisers, Dr. Shehab Ismail and Dr. Lamia Moghnieh and I wanted to examine the history and politics of medicine and psychiatry in the Middle East from the 1800s until the contemporary period so we are bringing together scholars from the Middle East, North Africa, North America, and Europe together to discuss recent trends in the field.
Figure. Medical school in 19th-century Ottoman Empire
You can listen to an interview I did with Professor Jennifer Derr (University of California, Santa Cruz), one of the participants of the workshop, about her upcoming research project on the history of Hepatitis and the liver in Egypt. The recording is available on Soundcloud. If you are interested in finding out more about us, you can check out our bios here.