Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt saw increasingly centralized political institutions arrogate to themselves authority over populations and individual bodies, often through force. But they also accomplished control through subtly coercive benevolence. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt traces this ambiguous benevolence through the famous Qasr al-Aini medical school and the medically trained men and women who served as intermediaries in state building and colonization. Drawing on existing literature and original archival research, Hibba Abugideiri compares two discontinuous stages in this process. In the first Mohammed Ali Pasha (1805–48) and his French physician-appointee, Clot Bey, strove to bring continental medicine to Egypt. In the second phase, under de facto British colonization, a secular rationalist hegemony emerged through interactions between biomedically trained Egyptian men and their British tutors. That secular understanding of nationalism extended through popular print media to Egyptians at large, though most effectively to the literate upper and upper middle classes in urban milieus. Victorian biomedicine construed in local terms came to frame an image of the Egyptian woman as the ‘republican mother’, at once a means of achieving, and a metaphor for, Egyptian nationalism. Contra British expectations but in keeping with their view that progress is gauged by women's status, the imagined ‘republican mother’ became a sign of Egypt's fitness for orderly, ‘modern’, secular self-rule.

Mohammed Ali's reforms to improve the health of the broader population observed gender segregation norms by educating women as medical midwives and hakimas (doctresses) whose roles ran parallel to those of male doctors. Earliest trainees were drawn from the ranks of Sudanese and Abyssinian slaves, palace eunuchs, and orphaned Egyptian girls. They received ‘practical training in midwifery, vaccination, bloodletting, and bandaging … typically taught in Parisian midwifery schools’ (p. 123). Despite their ambiguous respectability, these women served as health officers with broad responsibilities and access to women's homes. Under the British, however, indigenous male physicians gained newfound power and professional status, and female medics lost ground. Women who received medical training saw their courses shortened and their roles circumscribed. No longer able to work as general health officers, they became nurses and nurse midwives – assistants to medical men and subject to their authority. A paternalistic gender hierarchy grounded in Victorian practice and concepts of biological inevitability replaced the earlier parallel gender norms both among professionals and the wider population. The popular emphasis on women's roles in nurturing, childbearing, and domestic work received secular rationalization, arguably deepening gender disparities ideologically by anchoring them in science. The book is an important reminder that ‘modernization’ brings its own gender hierarchies and constraints.

Abugideiri's opposition of developments during Mohammed Ali's regime, which ended in 1848, with those of the British colonial period that began in 1882 is certainly useful for elucidating differences in medical education and practice before and after British occupation. However, it succeeds in part by eliding scientific, social, economic, and political events during the book's lacuna, 1849–81, a period that saw continued socioeconomic transformation under Ali's successors and increasing European implication in Egyptian affairs (think Suez Canal). The stark discrepancy that Abugideiri adduces between the start of her temporal frame and the Anglicizing process at its end was surely complicated by the significant advances in scientific knowledge during the interim, as well as by the state's political and economic imbrications with foreign powers.

Although Abugideiri notes that Mohammed Ali expanded militarily into Syria, Arabia, Libya, and Sudan, she does not consider how Egypt's divisive and increasingly circumscribed colonial presence south of Aswan affected intellectual and political collaborations during the British period. ‘The unity of the Nile Valley’ was a prominent refrain among educated classes from Cairo to Khartoum. On the British side, one is left with an impression of Egyptian exceptionalism (perhaps fostered by Foreign Office reports), as though the wider context of colonial Africa and Asia had little relevance for British strategies in Egypt. A fuller discussion of scientific rationalism and Islam as they intersect or diverge on the issues of gender and traditional practices would also have been welcome. What was it that Egyptian doctors with their Anglicized training sought to reform in their efforts to fashion indigenous women as ‘republican mothers’? What role did the trained midwives and nurses play in disseminating medical rationalism to the Egyptian public? How fully did it come to inform daily life? Such queries merely suggest the richness of the topics Abugideiri has delved into in this book. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt is a valuable analysis of how medical institution building paved the way for a syncretic indigenous medical discourse with significant implications for gender relations and for the rhetoric and mobilization of anti-colonial nationalism.