Institutions figure prominently in the historiography of medicine in the Middle East and North Africa. It was medical schools where physicians were trained and in hospitals and clinics where the sick became patients. These institutions figure especially prominently in the history of Egypt where they formed relatively early in comparison to other places in the region and in some cases, as with the hospitals at Qasr al-‘Ayni and ‘Abbasiyya, continue to function. During the British occupation of Egypt, public health outreach was minimal; the relatively small numbers of Egyptians who received allopathic care did so at institutions. The landscape of medicine shifted in the interwar period as a more activist Public Health Department directed interventions in the towns and villages of the countryside, aided by foreign organizations that included the Rockefeller Foundation. During the 1950s and 1960s, public health outreach expanded even further under the populist-authoritarian regime of Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and with the formation of a more robust public health international that participated in a wide range of programs based in Egypt. The co-existence of allopathic medicine and public health in Egypt raised a distinct set of questions concerning the roles of doctors and patients and the interactions among these groups. Using documents from the archives of the World Health Organization, publications aimed at Egyptian physicians, and the records of medical research conducted in Egypt, this paper explores the ideas and practices that surrounded the roles of doctor and patient in allopathic medicine and in public health and the tensions among them. It is specifically concerned with evolving notions of what defined “consent,” ideas about patient rights, and the significance of context and scale in shaping both of these concepts. These issues were complicated by class -- the poor were disproportionately represented as patients of institutions as they were objects of public health – as they were by the “field” of public health which was often the very environment in which rural communities lived and worked. While the object of biomedical intervention in the United States and Europe was most often the individual body of the patient, in Egypt, the outsized role occupied by public health blurred the boundaries between individuals, communities, and the environments in which they lived.