Description:

In this lecture, historian Khaled Fahmy will describe the process by which modern medicine was introduced in early 19th-century Egypt. He will discuss how dissection was instituted as a central practice in the Qasr al-'Aini School of Medicine, Egypt's first institution of modern medicine founded in 1827. He will chart how different segments of Egyptian society understood and reacted to this disturbing practice and explain the increasing reliance of a budding legal system on autopsies as a prime means to establish legal proof in criminal cases. As such, he will suggest how forensic medicine can be a lens through which a Muslim society's encounter with modern science can be understood.

Khaled Fahmy is Sultan Qaboos bin Sa’id Professor of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. He has written on military history, history of law (shari’a), history of medicine and of public hygiene – all with an emphasis on 19th-century Egypt. His books include In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt (2018), Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt (2008), Muhammad Ali Pasha and His Sabil (2005), The Body and Modernity: Essays in the History of Medicine and Law in Modern Egypt (in Arabic, 2004), and All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (1997).

co-sponsored by the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, the Science in Human Culture Program, and the Department of Religious Studies