Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt

2. Medicine, Law, and the Female Body

23 2 Medicine, Law, and the Female Body AJewish woman named Rahil Fisha was convicted for causing the death of her neighbor, Sarah Cohen, at childbirth in Alexandria. When labor was near and Sarah was agonizing in pain, her sister-in-law asked for Rahil’s help. Rahil advised her to apply some alcohol on the laboring woman’s thighs to intensify her contractions and facilitate birth. The alcohol caught fire and caused the death of both woman and child. Rahil was convicted for causing Sarah’s death and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. Important for our purpose here, she was convicted because she overstepped professional boundaries and meddled in business in which she had neither training nor knowledge. She was neither a hakima nor a midwife, only a neighbor, read the Alexandria Appellate Council’s verdict.1 In 1827 Mehmed Ali Pasha hired French surgeon Antoine Barthélémy Clot, who later became known as Clot Bey, to oversee a thorough reform of the Egyptian medical system. A few years later, Clot Bey opened a school for hakimas (female medical practitioners)2 with the purposes of replacing Egyptian midwives , whom he dubbed “the most ignorant and superstitious in the world,” and introducing modern medical standards to labor and birth.3 The school never managed to recruit enough students to be able to replace midwives at childbirth. Based at police stations, the hakimas intervened mainly in complicated births and served as forensic experts in criminal investigations. Due to the shortage in trained personnel, midwives were conscripted to participate in state-sponsored vaccination campaigns. Because they delivered most of the babies, they were charged with reporting every birth and could be held accountable for failing to do so. In some cases, they served as forensic experts as well. As Hibba Abugideiri 24 | Policing Egyptian Women argues, this division of labor complicates any clear categorization of “modern” and “traditional,” “state agents” and nonstate actors.4 Consistent with my argument in the previous chapter, I demonstrate here how the police station and more specifically, the hakima’s office, became a site of state formation. It was also a site in which new notions of body and knowledge were articulated. In these particular sites, women’s narration of their own bodies was already a product of the encounter with state officials. In other words, women’s narration of their bodies in the police station and their intimate experience of their bodies were inevitably mediated through power relations, as well as through language. Particularly here, agency was enabled and articulated with the newly formulated legal and medical language encountered in the police station, which made bodily experiences intelligible.5 In late nineteenth-century Egypt, the emergence of new examinations and procedures created new experiences of the female body. These sometimes replaced, and more often supplemented, existing idioms and practices that similarly existed in specific power relations and medicated bodily experiences (and were thus no less “authentic” or “real”). The new subjectivities created through these interactions create the capacity for action—challenging, going to court, reclaiming control over their bodies, asking for a hakima’s assistance. In this chapter, I am interested in discourses and practices that made female bodies legible and question what kinds of abstractions and categories women used for understanding their bodies, based on police and court records as well as writings of elite critics of folk medicine. At the same time, I question how hakimas gained an authority that led women to consult them and parents to bring daughters in for investigation, and rendered other women— both midwives and laywomen—insufficiently equipped to handle complicated birth or to read evidence on women’s bodies. I argue that interactions between the hakimas and individual women established boundaries between the knowledgeable hakima and the “ignorant” midwife. Women who turned to the police station and had their bodies examined for traces of crime were the ones who reaffirmed the authority of police personnel, and most notably the hakima, over their bodies. Such interactions, moreover, simultaneously created new categories of self-knowledge and new ways of narrating and of making sense of their bodies. Medicine, Law, and the Female Body | 25 “The Most Superstitious Midwives in the World” So the day is coming, we hope, when the dangerous “remedies” of the modern Nile Dwellers will be no longer practiced, but will be relegated to the archives of human error.6 Many nineteenth-century women...