Biography

Ahmed Ragab is a historian, physician and a documentary filmmaker. He is an associate professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the founding director of the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. He is co-editor of Osiris (journal of the History of Science Society) and editor of Johns Hopkins UP book series: Global Histories of Medicine, Science, Race and Colonialism. Ragab is the author of "The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion and Charity" (Cambridge UP, 2015), "Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam" (Routledge, 2018), and "Medicine and Religion in the Life of an Ottoman Sheikh" (Routledge, 2019). He’s currently working on a book titled "Around the Clock: Time in Medieval Islamic Clinical Culture" (under contract with Johns Hopkins UP).

Project Abstract

Physicians are always out of time. Burnout is a key risk in medical practice today. For medieval physicians, this fact was as old as the profession: Hippocrates famously encapsulated this complaint in his Aphorisms: "The art is long, and life is short." There was truth to this aphorism. Studying medicine was long and arduous; prospects of financial gain were uncertain, and practice meant seeing many patients in little time. This grant will support writing a book under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press. The book investigates the history of time as a medical category: what it meant in medical thought and practice, in understanding bodies and diseases, in professional development, and in medical ethics, and how it interacted with the religious, cultural, and social meanings of time.

Medieval physicians and patients contended with acute conditions and emergencies, chronic conditions, disabilities, and disease progress, which was thought to be influenced by astrological conditions. Time was also key to understanding the human body, which was influenced by seasons and changed by age. The proposed book investigates the production of time as a conceptual and practical category in medieval Islamic medicine. "Time" here is seen here as a cultural category understood at the intersection of the theoretical and practical and as a locus of meaning-making. It also acquires additional texture within non-medical cultural constructions. In this context, "medical time" encountered the five daily prayers, the religious feasts, and the lunar and solar calendars. In short, this book aims to investigate the thick web of meanings that made "time" a sensible and comprehensible, if not always coherent, category.

Curriculum vitae

Education

PhD (2011) Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

MBBCH/MD (2004), Cairo University School of Medicine

Academic Positions

Since 2022

Chair, Medicine, Science and the Humanities Program, Kreiger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University 

Since 2021

Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Since 2019

Director, The Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies

Selected Publications

Manuscript in preparation, 2024. Around the Clock: Time in Medieval Islamic Clinical Cultures. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

2023, co-editor with Myrna Perez Sheldon and Terence Keel. Critical Approaches to Science and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

2019. Medicine and Religion in the Life of an Ottoman Sheikh: Al-Damanhuri’s “Clear Statement” on Anatomy. London: Routledge Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429001031.

2018. Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351103534.

2015. The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion and Charity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316271797.

2010. "Epistemic Authority of Women in the Medieval Middle East." Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 8 (2): 181-216. https://doi.org/10.1163/156920810X529949.