The history of mental illness and psychiatry in the Middle East in particular reflects the multiple ways in which colonial governments and modern nation-states defined their national projects and relationships with their subjects. With the advent of British colonial rule in 1882, and the British professionalization of mental health, the responsibility for treating mental illnesses was placed within the hands of British, and British-trained, male doctors who acquired increasing legitimacy. A new medical discourse was created in which women were the objects of the medical gaze of these men. As the Annual Reports of the Mental Disease Administration and the Lunacy Division during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt will attest, women, as both patients and nurses, were a central part of the new medical and social order that was being defined and constructed by British authorities. This study will therefore illustrate how gender norms were affected by the changes wrought by the professionalization of psychiatry. The study will further demonstrate how the professionalization of mental health, as practiced in the asylum by male doctors who possessed medical authority over women’s minds and bodies, was different from popular healing methods such as the za?r, in which women were the primary providers and patients. It will also reveal how the psychiatric profession, and the men that represented it, constructed a modern trope of the “new woman” in Egypt. As Egyptian psychiatrists began to perceive of themselves as members of a distinct medical profession, they began to express their medical and non-medical views on the pages of the burgeoning press. Emerging mental health constructs were thus being transferred from the hallways of the asylum to the homes of Egyptian families through the pages of the Egyptian press. To understand these constructions, the study will make use of journals printed in Cairo and Alexandria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These include al-Muqtat?af, al-S?ih?h?a, al-Mu?ayyad, al-Majallah al-S?ih?h?i?yah, al-Majallah al-T?ibbi?yah al-Mis?ri?yah, and al-Bala?gh al-Isbu??i?. The study will further make use of primary archival material, including government memoranda and administrative reports, in Da?r al-Watha??iq al-Qawmi?yah in Egypt and in the National Archives at Kew Gardens in the UK. In addition, Lunacy Division Reports, Reports of the Medical Officer of Health in Cairo, and Annual Reports of the Department of Public Health with specific sections on the “Lunatic Asylum” will also be accessed at the Wellcome Library in the UK.