Photography’s Application to Medicine in Colonial Egypt

• In Event: Representations of Health, Disease and Bodies in the Middle East (C19th-C20th)

English Abstract

This paper addresses the photograph as a historical source to explore unmapped territories in histories of medicine and photography in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egypt. First, it examines how the application of photography to medicine emerged in Egypt, who practiced it and why, what criteria governed the selection of photographs in scientific and medical publications, and what functions they performed or were intended to serve. As such, it demonstrates how medical photography in Egypt developed along broader global practices in photography, printing, and modern medicine. Second, this paper asks what stories these photographs can and may tell us about the practice of modern medicine in a colonial context that written texts cannot or do not. A juxtaposition in colonial doctors’ selection of photographs with that of Arabic scientific periodicals reveals many similarities between local and colonial use of medical photographs but one clear distinction, namely the use of photographs on the part of local medical practitioners as pictures of health, defined by anthropologist Zeynep Devrim Gürsel not as “images of pathology but photographs that visualize successful medical care.”

Author

• Tamara Maatouk