In 1904, Dr. Naguib Mahfouz, a pioneer of obstetrics and gynecology in Egypt, started a maternity clinic at Cairo's Qasr al-Ayni Hospital. Demand grew quickly, and the clinic became a full department at the medical school. Midwives continued to attend in-home births, but Egyptian women increasingly sought out specialists for fertility issues, pregnancy complications, and birth injuries. Mahfouz and new classes of Egyptian medical practitioners, including some women doctors, worked to develop surgical techniques that could heal bodies and save maternal and fetal lives.
Hard Labors explores the embodied experiences of pregnancy and childbirth through the double meaning of birth work—the labors of those who carried and birthed babies and the doctors and midwives caring for them. To develop new treatments and procedures, including cesarean sections and surgeries to repair ruptures and remove tumors, doctors drew on knowledge produced on and with women's bodies—parts of which also found afterlives in Mahfouz's medical museum. Reconstructing patient histories, Beth Baron traces how medical knowledge was created through women's bodies and by those treating them. The result is a new understanding of the body, medicine, and colonialism in Egypt.