Narrating care and medical authority in Egyptian fiction: a medical humanities approach

This article analyses how Egyptian novels construct experiences of medicine, care and institutional authority through comparative close readings of Naguib Mahfouz’s The Day the Leader Was Killed , Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel , Ahmed Mourad’s The Blue Elephant and Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero . Situated in medical humanities, it treats literature as narrative knowledge production, articulating ethical and experiential dimensions of medicine beyond empirical documentation. Drawing on narrative and institutional theory, the article develops a four-part analytical vocabulary—bureaucratic waiting, doctrinal gatekeeping, diagnostic confinement and carceral gynaecology—each anchored in sustained close reading of one novel and traced through spatial organisation, temporality and epistemic hierarchy across realist, historical, thriller and testimonial genres. Foregrounding waiting, uncertainty, ambivalence and coercion over clinical outcomes—and contextualised by health metaphors in works like Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s Utopia and Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue —these narratives expose normalised structural harm. The analysis contributes to medical humanities by expanding its geographical scope beyond Euro-American contexts, while demonstrating fiction’s role in generating ethical vocabularies for medicine, power and care that complement clinical approaches.