School for hakımāt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
School for hakımāt was a medical school for girls in Abu Zaabal in Egypt, founded in 1832.[1] It gave women a medical training to enable them to give medical care for women patients in a Muslim society with gender segregation. It was a pioneer school for the educational history for women in Egypt.
The school was founded by the French physician Antoine-Barthelemy Clot (Bey) on the order of Muhammad Ali Pasha. Muhammad Ali Pasha wished for the public to become vaccinated, and had founded a medical school for men in 1827. However, the customary Islamic gender segregation made it impossible for men to perform vaccination on female patients, and therefore there was a need to educate female medical practitioners.[2]
However, the customary Islamic gender segregation made it difficult to enroll females in school, so Antoine Barthelemy Clot had to buy 24 Sudanese and Ethiopian girls in the Egyptian slave market to acquire students for his school.[3]
