MESA Banner
Clot Bey and the Establishment of Medical Orientalism in Egypt
Abstract
After a long and vicious fight between the French, British, Ottomans and Mameluke Beys, Egypt fell to Muhammad Ali an Albanian soldier from Kavala around 1805. While he did not set out to become the founder of an Egyptian dynasty, his career as the governor in Egypt ended with his family firmly entrenched as the dynasty that ruled Egypt until 1952. He established bureaucratic organizations that competed with existing social structures to gain both support and legitimacy as Egypt’s ruler. One of his most long-lasting accomplishments was the establishment of the medical school at Qasr al-Aini, a palace converted into a hospital by the French during the occupation of 1798-1801. Muhammad Ali placed European doctors in the position of educators and Egypt born doctors as support staff to entrench the notion that the center of the production of medical knowledge rested in the training of European doctors in European schools. To lead this effort, Muhammad Ali hired Antione Clot-Bey to teach medical sciences with the sole purpose of providing a medical corps for his military. Clot-Bey, the son of a soldier who partook in the Egyptian campaign transposed the work of the Orientalist scholars who came to Egypt with Napoleon by establishing Europeans in positions of authority and power well before the occupation of Egypt by the British in 1882. This paper will explore the ways that the medical school led by Clot-Bey established the notion of medical orientalism-to diminish both local notions of healing and healthcare while bolstering the superiority of European medical training coupled with the inferiority of Egyptian doctors because of their Oriental nature.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries