SCHOOL FOR HAKīMāT

Western-style medical school and hospital established in 1827 in Abu Zaʿbal, Egypt.

In 1832, Muhammad Ali, ruler of Egypt, opened a school for hakımāt (women physicians). In the 1820s Egypt was underpopulated, and endemic and epidemic diseases, including smallpox, syphilis, plague, cholera, as well as stillbirths, were decimating the population. To strengthen Egypt's military and industrial workforce and to improve public health, Muhammad Ali recruited a French physician, Antoine-Barthelemy Clot (Bey), to establish a Western-style medical school and hospital in Abu Zaʿbal. A number of physicians came from Europe to train Egyptian medical students and also health barbers, who customarily carried out minor surgical procedures such as bloodletting in addition to haircutting, to vaccinate the population against smallpox. However, the health barbers had limited access to women and children, who thus remained unvaccinated. In addition, the physicians believed that the high rate of stillbirths was caused by uneducated local midwives. To address these issues, as well as to control the spread of syphilis among his troops, Muhammad Ali also asked Clot (Bey) to establish a European-style medical school specifically to train women physicians (hakımāt ), which opened at Abu Zaʿbal in 1832, and was subsequently moved to Qasr al-Ayni. Students for the first classes were Abyssinian and Sudanese girls purchased at the Cairo slave market and abandoned Egyptian girls living in a hospice for the poor. In later years, Egyptian military families also sent their daughters to the school.

In a six-year program, the students were taught to read and write Arabic, vaccinate against smallpox, bleed, perform obstetric maneuvers, treat and report cases of syphilis, register births and deaths, and conduct postmortems on female corpses. Upon graduation they received a military rank and were married to officers of similar rank. The hakımāt were familiar figures in the countryside where they were called in medical emergencies, in coroners' offices where they carried out postmortem examinations, in police stations where they conducted forensic procedures, and in court houses where they testified in criminal cases. Their working conditions, salary, and social status, however, remained low.

Nevertheless, control of the school gradually shifted to the hakımāt. The first director of the school was Madame Fery, who retired in 1836. Palmyre Gault, a graduate of the midwifery program and the maternity hospital in Paris, immediately succeeded her but died of plague in 1840. In 1844 a Coptic male physician became director, followed by two graduates of the school. Following the British occupation in 1882, the colonial authorities sharply limited enrollment in the medical schools and insisted that they use British textbooks and teach in English only. The school at Qasr al-Ayni became little more than a school for midwives.

see also gender: gender and economy; gender: gender and education; mabarrat muhammad ali.

Bibliography

Fahmy, Khalid. "Women, Medicine, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Egypt." In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, edited by Lila Abu-Lughod. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Kuhnke, LaVerne. Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Mahfouz, Naguib. The History of Medical Education in Egypt. Cairo: Government Press, 1935.

nancy gallagher