Egypt's Popular Uprising and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality.

Amidst the recent political uprisings in the Arab region, physicians and other healthcare workers have found themselves in the crossfire. This paper focuses on Egypt's doctors, paying special attention to how many have both appealed to and practiced medical neutrality as its own potent and contested political stance, particularly since the period of military rule following Mubarak's removal from power. Our paper draws on interviews with physicians who served as volunteers in the field hospitals in the days of unrest and violence, and with others who played a major role in documenting protesters' injuries, police brutality, and other forms of state violence against unarmed citizens.

Gendering the Gift of Life: Family Politics and Kidney Donation in Egypt and Mexico.

In this article, we demonstrate how living kidney donation is a particularly gendered experience. We draw on anthropologists' contributions to understanding the globalization of reproductive technologies to argue that kidney donation similarly endangers and preserves fertility, thereby unsettling and reifying gendered familial labor. Based on fieldwork in two ethnographic sites--Egypt and Mexico--we examine how kidney donation is figured as a form of social reproduction.

Political challenges to biomedical universalism: kidney failure among Egypt's poor.

Why do patients in need of kidney transplants in Egypt decline offers of kidney donation from their family members out of reluctance to cause them harm? Is it not universally the case that a living donor could live in complete health with a single remaining kidney? To address this conundrum, I discuss a case study from Egypt, in which patients reveal social, political, and environmental stresses on organ function that challenge the presumed universal efficacy and safety of kidney transplantation. I demonstrate that the biomedical position on the tolerable risks posed to the living donor is conditional and premised on particular social and historical contingencies that can be misaligned when applied in other contexts. Drawing on the work of Margaret Lock, I illustrate how analytical contributions of medical anthropologists can shed light on a political and public health impasse about how to legally regulate organ transplantation in Egypt.