Decolonizing Medicine and Science in North Africa

Since the nineteenth century, medicine and science have been perceived as a monolithic tool for domination, inextricably linked to Europe’s imperial expansion into the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To that end, nineteenth-and twentieth-century colonialism resulted in medical and scientific materials from North Africa residing in European archives, institutes and museums, thus hardening racial boundaries and imbricating coercive medical and scientific archives. This paper examines how non-elite North Africans functioned as mediators, co-producers, and resistors of these colonial dynamics in medicine and science. At the same time, it will consider how Arab/Islamic and traditional knowledge were integrated into global epistemologies of medicine and science. Emerging from a point of decolonial and anti-colonial methodology, this paper will narrate the medical/scientific lives from Egypt and Tunisia that currently reside in European institutes as well as those that previously resided at the Institute of Egypt. The paper will articulate the conditions of possibility for how these artifacts, knowledge systems, and people undergo a series of cross-cultural exchanges undergo colonial and postcolonial contexts. More specifically, it will investigate the funding, production and circulation of science, highlight the dynamism of “traditional” science, and the syncretism of knowledge traditions.