Two students and a corpse: the semantics of disgust in the making of colonial knowledge

ABSTRACT

The central piece in Cairo medical school’s museum is a painting portraying the school’s first dissection lesson. Dissection was central to the agenda of the school’s founder, Antoine Barthelemy Clot (d. 1868). In Clot’s narrative, dissection was key to modern scientific education. In his writings, he chronicled what he believed to be his students’ resistance and disgust with the practice. This article investigates the emotional underwriting of colonial science, and explores the role played by disgust in constructing colonial narratives of progress and scientific authority, and in the postcolonial narratives of colonial and precolonial history. It argues that disgust, along with similar emotions, functions on a moral economy that underwrites and authorizes the production of colonial scientific authority.

KEYWORDS:

• Disgust
• dissection
• colonial disgust
• affect
• Darwin
• Clot
• Cairo
• medical school
• Qasr Al-Ayni

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The museum’s unpublished inventory lists this painting as #4. Qasr al-Ayni Museum, Inventory, P. 1.

2. Clot-Bey, Mémoires de A.-B. Clot bey; Dubois, Clot Bey.

3. See Clot, Travaux de l’École de Médecine.

4. Chiffoleau, Médecines et Médecins en Egypte; and See also Sonbol, The Creation of a Medical Profession.

5. Panzac, “Médecine Révolutionnaire”; and Dubois, Clot Bey.

6. Panzac, “Médecine Révolutionnaire.” Foucault famously considered Bichat’s work to be central to the development of new trends in experimental medicine; See Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 140–148; See also Tierney, “Anatomy and Governmentality.” On the context of French medicine at the time, focusing on the school of Paris, see, among others, Weiner and Sauter, “The Rise of Clinical Medicine.” It is worth noting that this discussion concerns the use of dissection in medical education. In the decades following the establishment of dissection in the medical school, autopsy was used in the legal system. While this aspect is beyond the focus of this paper, it entailed similar concerns to those discussed below; On autopsy, see Fahmy, “The anatomy of justice”; and Fahmy, In Quest of Justice.

7. Fahmy, “The Sheikh and the Corpse.”

8. See Thomson, Bodies of Thought; Israel, Enlightenment Contested; Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization.” It is evident from Clot’s various writings that he perceived himself as part of contemporary debates around science and religion, in general, and Islam in particular. These debates were also evident in the writings of other contemporary French scholars, colonialists and orientalists as will be seen below.

9. Bījin and Clot-Bey, Mubligh al-Barāḥ fī ʻIlm al-Jirāḥ, 15.

10. Ibid., 16.

11. Ibid., 12.

12. See note 3 above.

13. Clot, Observation D’une Amputation, 7.

14. Cited and translated by Khaled Fahmy. Fahmy, “Medicine and Power,” 19.

15. Clot-Bey, Kunūz al-Ṣiḥḥah.

16. Clot-Bey, Amrāḍ al-Aṭfāl, 6.

17. For instance, see Joseph Boone’s analysis of the use of disgust in the works of key Orientalists, such as Burton and Lane, especially in relation to same-sex relations. Boone, “Vacation Cruises”; See also Mepschen et al. “Sexual Politics.”; and Abusharaf, “We Have Supped so Deep in Horrors’”.

18. Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism.”; and See also Anderson, Colonial Pathologies.

19. On colonial disgust, see, among others, De Pina‐Cabral, “Galvão Among the Cannibals.”; Abusharaf, “We Have Supped so Deep in Horrors”; Durham, “Disgust and the Anthropological Imagination.”; Krebs, “Multiculturalism and Colonial Continuity.”; and Chatterjee et al. “Feeling Modern.”

20. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion.

21. Livingston, “Disgust.”

22. See note 20 above.

23. Clot-Bey, Amrāḍ al-Aṭfāl, 6, 24–29;and Clot, Aperçu Général sur l’Egypte.

24. See, for instance, Clot, Amputation dans l’Articulation Coxo-fémorale;and Clot, Histoire d’une Tumeur Éléphantiaque Du Scrotum.

25. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 82.

26. Ibid.

27. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 82; See also Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust. In the same vein, Kylie Sago investigated colonial disgust in constructing and receiving sampled foods of the colonies at the Exposition Universelle of 1889; see Sago, “Eating the inedible.”

28. Ragab, “Monsters and Patients.”

29. Ḥaqqī, Qandīl Umm Hāshim. For English translation; see Ḥaqqī, The Lamp of Umm Hashim.

30. Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism.”

31. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; See also Goussot, “Frantz Fanon et la Rencontre avec l’Autre.”