Healing the Body, Healing the Islamic Umma: Medicine, Corporeality, and the Polity in the Middle East and North Africa

Ellen J. Amster is the Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and an associate professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Department of History. Her research touches upon non-Western health and healing systems, traditional midwifery, phenomenology of the body, the modern history of public health, Islamic science, French and Islamic medical histories, and the physical geographies of Sufism. Her 2013 book Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas) argues for seeing colonialism as a process of embodiment, how Islamic and positivist epistemologies have been ingested and digested, and become the fabric of the polity.