Quest for conception : gender, infertility, and Egyptian medical traditions / Marcia C. Inhorn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Inhorn, Marcia C., 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Infertility, Female--Treatment--Egypt.

Infertility, Female.

Traditional medicine--Egypt.

Traditional medicine.

Infertility, Female--therapy.

Medicine, Traditional.

Infertility, Female--Treatment.

Egypt.

Medical Subjects:

Infertility, Female--therapy.

Medicine, Traditional.

Egypt.

Physical Description:

xxvii, 441 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [1994]

Summary:

In Quest for Conception, Marcia C. Inhorn portrays the poignant struggles of poor, urban Egyptian women and their attempts to overcome infertility. The author draws upon fifteen months of fieldwork in urban Egypt to present moving stories of infertile Muslim women whose tumultuous medical pilgrimages -- or their "search for children," as they call their quests for conception -- have yet to produce the desired pregnancies. Inhorn examines the devastating impact of infertility on the lives of these women, who are threatened with divorce by their husbands, harassed by their husbands' families, and ostracized by neighbors.

Beliefs about procreation and infertility causation and cure among the Egyptian urban poor derive from a five-thousand-year history of shifting medical pluralism. Although colonially produced Western biomedicine is the dominant system in Egypt today, it represents only one of an array of therapeutic alternatives. Infertile women seek help from both "biogynecologists" (practitioners of Western biomedicine) and "ethnogynecologists" (practitioners of indigenous ethnomedicine), often using the remedies of both simultaneously. Quest for Conception examines in detail the variety of ethnomedical and biomedical treatments for infertility and concludes that treatments of both types are often ineffective and sometimes harmful. Given this untherapeutic setting, the future of infertile Egyptian women is explored in light of needed changes in reproductive health policy and the introduction of new reproductive technologies.

Quest for Conception is the first comprehensive account of non-Western women's experiences of infertility and is a novel study within the literature on Middle Eastern women.

Contents:

Preface: Hind's Story xix

Part 1 Problem, Place, and Procreative Theory

Chapter 1. The Infertility Problem in Egypt 3

Chapter 2. Ancient Alexandria and Its Modern Poor 39

Chapter 3. Past and Present in Theories of Procreation 49

Part 2 Ethnogynecology

Chapter 4. Healers, Herbalists, and Holy Ones 81

Chapter 5. Kabsa and Threatened Fertility 111

Chapter 6. From Humidity to Sorcery 158

Chapter 7. Divinity, Profanity, and Pilgrimage 206

Part 3 Biogynecology

Chapter 8. Biomedical Bodies 241

Chapter 9. Untherapeutic Therapeutics 286

Chapter 10. The Injection of Spermatic Animals 318

Chapter 11. Babies of the Tubes 334

Chapter 12. Futures for the Infertile 345

Appendix 1. Fieldwork 357

Appendix 2. Informants 371.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [401]-428) and index.

ISBN:

0812232216

0812215281

OCLC:

30074129