The Work of Illness in the Aftermath of a ‘Surpassing Disaster’: Medical Humanities in the Middle East and North Africa

How might Middle East studies transform the Medical Humanities, broadly conceived? Drawing inspiration from Georges Canguilhem’s epistemology of medicine and Frantz Fanon’s theorization of the intersection of psychiatry and medicine, I argue that rather than an approach that simply adds the Middle East to purportedly epistemologically secure notions of medicine and psychiatry, we might, alongside these thinkers, query the stability of such practices as uniform Western formations.