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.

This article examines the durability of high postmortem examination rates in Israel between the 1950s-1980s. Previous studies overlooked the issue of medical authority and the social history of autopsy, focusing on policy, technological development, and conflict between science and religion. By contrast, our analysis brings together the medical interest in unlimited research of dead bodies and the power relations between doctors and subaltern groups in Israel. Based on the Israeli State Archives, the Hebrew University Archives, and the daily press, we argue that medical biopolitical aspirations and the public shaped the history of postmortem examinations in Israel. High rates were embedded in the medical construction of doubt regarding the cause of death that only physicians could resolve by autopsy. Civilian protests led to a temporary decrease in the 1960s, while political and medical intervention brought about a gradual resurgence in postmortem rates in the 1980s.