The Organ that Traveled the World: Medicine, Capitalism, and the Environmental Body

“The Organ that Traveled the World” explores the history of liver disease in 20th- and 21st-century Egypt and what it reveals about the entangled histories of biomedicine and the environment on a global scale. This prevalence of disease resulted from the changed ecologies of a dammed Nile River and a biomedical treatment campaign that had the unintended effect of spreading hepatitis C. This book traces the roles of Egyptian physicians, scientists, and patients in shaping knowledge about the liver, and the relationships among environmental transformation, the history of medicine, and the history of capitalism.

An undergraduate research partner would help to build an Arabic-language archive and bibliography for the project and summarize some of the literature included in this bibliography. The archive would include sources specific to the governance of Egypt from the 1950s to1990s as well as those relevant to the histories of science and medicine in the Middle East and North Africa more broadly. The student would gain experience performing in-depth archival and library research as well as a developed knowledge of the history of the Middle East in the 20th century and the histories of medicine and science during the Cold War. Strong Arabic language skills are essential.