During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Egyptian medicine was one of Britain’s “tools of empire.” Like steamers, quinine prophylaxis, quick-firing rifles, cables and railroads, historians of imperial science have added medicine to Britain’s arsenal of nineteenth-century technologies as it too allowed the English to penetrate and maintain imperial rule in Africa and Asia. This study on colonial Egypt similarly understands medicine as a technology of power, not over the natural world, but more significantly over people. It addresses how medicine allowed Britain to sustain Egypt as a colonial satellite by controlling its medical institutions and public health policies. Indeed, medicine was at the heart of Britain’s empire building in turn-of-the-century Egypt and the roles of Qasr al-Aini – Egypt’s only school of medicine at the time – and the School of Midwifery were determinative in transforming native practices of medical care and caregiving in unprecedented ways. However, Britain’s mandate of consolidating colonial rule is only half of the story of imperial medicine in Egypt. The other half is told by the often unrecognized role of natives who stood between Victorian science in London and native medical practices in Cairo. Rather than characterize this medical encounter in necessarily binary terms (i.e., antagonistic to British imperialism), this paper argues that intermediary Egyptian practitioners – like doctors and midwives – helped negotiate this spatial divide in ways both expected and unexpected, and thus complicates notions of native agency in the making of colonial medicine.