One Model Liver Measuring Infection with Schistosoma mansoni and Hepatitis C in 20th-Century Egypt

• In Event: The Measure of an Organ: Epistemologies of Quantification and Bodily Visibility across Time and Space

Abstract

This paper charts the history of the quantified imagination of the liver in twentieth-century Egypt. Working from the idea that fields of medical knowledge are in part the product of the local conditions in which they are produced, it examines the field of hepatology in Egypt, and specifically how the prevalence of infection with Schistosoma mansoni and hepatitis C have shaped the assessment and imagination of the liver in biomedical practice. The particular history of the liver in Egypt began in the middle of the nineteenth century with the introduction of new irrigation practices and their effect in fuelling parasitic infection. The completion of the Aswan High Dam produced a shift in the geography of the two Schistosoma parasites that produce schistosomiasis; infection with Schistosoma mansoni, which causes hepatic fibrosis, became widespread throughout the Nile Delta and Nile Valley. Nationwide treatment campaigns for schistosomiasis that began in 1920 and stretched through the 1980s produced a booming epidemic of hepatitis C. By the end of the twentieth century, between ten and twenty percent of the Egyptian population was infected with the virus. When the field of tropical medicine gave birth to that of hepatology in Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century, liver disease had become normative. Working from sources from the archives of the World Health Organization, the Egyptian National Library and Archives, and interviews with Egyptian physicians, this paper interrogates the relationship among methods of assessment and measurement, local landscapes of disease, and models of the liver.

Author

• Jennifer L Derr, University of California, Santa Cruz