The Trauma of Medical Training in Two Webcomics: A Call for Multimodal Citation.

Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent to engage with visual media forms and creative expression, whether film, comics, or animation, even as these media have been shown to augment the bodily and emotional impact on the viewers as compared to solely text-based media. This essay is an attempt to rethink how medical anthropologists can engage more with visual media, taking as an example two comic memoirs created by physicians about their medical training: "Healing Alone" (2019) and "Dailies of a Junior Doc" (2021).

Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Medical Mobilization in Post-revolutionary Egypt.

In this article, we investigate the links between medical practice and expertise, on the one hand, and nationalist discourses, on the other, in the 2011 Egyptian uprising and the years that followed, which witnessed a consolidation of authoritarianism. We ask how it is that doctors, whose social capital in part rests on their being seen as "apolitical," played a significant role in countering consecutive regimes' acts of violence and denial. We trace the trajectory of the doctors' mobilization in the 2011 uprising and beyond and demonstrate how the doctors drew on their professional expertise and nationalist sentiment in their struggles against a hypernationalistic military state.

Comics and revolution as global public health intervention: The Case of .

In this article, we discuss the inextricable entanglement of public health and political revolution, and why comics is a particularly amenable medium to explore how different people come to terms with illness and mortality against the backdrop of political, economic, and environmental crises. We discuss our process in creating a sequential comic narrative, Lissa, that portrays a working-class Egyptian family, informed by hundreds of interviews and ethnographic research in Egypt on the vulnerabilities that expose people to kidney and liver disease and the difficulties of accessing proper treatment. Lissa also draws on ethnographic research and interviews in the U.

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.

All Eyes on Egypt: Islam and the Medical Use of Dead Bodies Amidst Cairo's Political Unrest.

Using dead bodies for medical purposes has long been considered taboo in Egypt. Public health campaigns, physicians' pleas, and the urgings of religious scholars all failed to alter public opinion regarding the donation of dead bodies either for instructional material or for therapeutic treatments. Yet in 2011, amid revolutionary turmoil in Egypt, a campaign was launched for people to donate their eyes upon death; this time, people readily signed up to be donors.

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.

Not quite dead: why Egyptian doctors refuse the diagnosis of death by neurological criteria.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt focused on organ transplantation, this paper examines the ways in which the "scientific" criteria of determining death in terms of brain function are contested by Egyptian doctors. Whereas in North American medical practice, the death of the "person" is associated with the cessation of brain function, in Egypt, any sign of biological life is evidence of the persistence, even if fleeting, of the soul. I argue that this difference does not exemplify an irresolvable culture clash but points to an unsettling aspect of cadaveric organ procurement that has emerged wherever organ transplantation is practiced.