The Moral Discourse of Health in Modern Cairo
Persons, Bodies, and Organs
By (author) Mohammed Tabishat
Publication date:
21 March 2014Length of book:
202 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739179796
In The Moral Discourse of Health in Modern Cairo: Persons, Bodies, and Organs, Mohammed Tabishat posits that health care practices in Egypt constitute an index to read the way political, economic, and social conditions are experienced by those who use, embody, or live them and cope with their outcomes. These practices carry the code of the socio-cultural matrix in which they are embedded; they speak of the rationalities of different help-seeking efforts. In doing so, they represent the moral principles underlying the social efforts to alleviate pain and maintain life as a whole. Health-related practices in this sense constitute a critical platform to know, feel and live in both the physical and moral sense.
Mohammed Tabishat has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the everyday health problems of the poorer classes in Cairo. Most interesting is his account of the Islamic concept of al-nafs that people employ to address—as a single field of dis-ease—what biomedicine identifies as either ‘physical’ or ‘psychological’ illness and as its social, political, and economic causes. Strongly recommended.