The Figure of the Doctor in Nasser-Era Cinema: Film as an STS Archive

During the 1947 cholera epidemic in Egypt, which killed over 20,000 Egyptians, the young Dr. Shokry is posted to a remote village. He ends up not only treating the village's patients but also helping them uncover the corruption responsible for their poverty and starvation—namely, the feudal system, represented by the landlord Adel Bey. In time, Dr. Shokry discovers those who do not obey Adel Bey’s orders end up in the mental asylum. Dr. Shokry finds himself in confrontation not just with Adel Bey but also with British soldiers and with the village’s daya (traditional midwife).

In the late 1960s, Dr. Aziz is sick and is sent to an isolated sanatorium in a remote desert area in Egypt. He discovers therein that the sanatorium is divided into two sections: one for the rich who receive proper care, and one for the poor who are left to languid in overcrowded wards with no proper food, water, or medical treatment.

The aforementioned are cinematic depictions of doctors in two important 1960s Egyptian movies: respectively, Siraʿ al-abtal [Struggle of the Heroes] (1962) and al-Mutamarridun [The Rebels] (1968). While each film comments on a different era, semi-colonial Egypt and the late Nasserist era, respectively, they both offer a window into the depiction of doctors as scientists, as care providers, and as social and political actors in mainstream Egyptian discourse and into the instrumentalization of doctors in the Nasserist project.

Relying on insights from the history of medicine, the history of cinema, and critical visual STS, this paper proposes cinema as an archive of social and political ideas about medicine and centers the “performativity of the archive,” focusing less on the veracity of what is represented and more on its functions and what it is capable of producing in a particular time and place.