Naguib Pasha Mahfouz - Early Life

Early Life

Mahfouz was born to a Coptic Christian family on the January 5, 1882 in the city of Mansoura in the delta of Egypt. He joined Kasr El Aini Medical School in 1898, where teaching was predominantly undertaken by eminent European professors. At this time, Kasr El Aini hospital had no department of obstetrics and gynaecology, and the only case of labour that he attended "ended fatally for both mother and child". In June 1902, when Mahfouz was about to take his final year exams, there was an outbreak of cholera in Egypt and medical students were recruited to help combat the epidemic. The medical school was closed and exams postponed. Mahfouz was initially assigned to the Cairo railway station, to examine suspected cholera patients coming from Upper Egypt. Mahfouz paid a visit to the Health Department Director General and demanded to be sent to Mousha, a village in Upper Egypt near Assiut which was particularly hard-hit by the deadly disease and where a doctor had just succumbed to the same disease he had been sent to fight. In Mousha, young Mahfouz traced the cholera deaths to an infected well in a farmer's house. Within a week of the discovery of the well, the Mousha cholera epidemic had come to an end and so a nineteen-year-old medical student succeeded where a body of the ablest and most experienced British Public Health Department experts had failed. Mahfouz subsequently had similar success in fighting cholera in Deirout in Upper Egypt, as well as in and Alexandria.