Medicine,Disability and Family in an Affluent Arab Society: The Case of Zahira Qetub

Abstract

Modern medicine has a global reach. Although medicine is always directed clinically to individual patients with varied family connections in a particular cultural setting, the knowledge and technology of medicine are abstract and scientific, diffusing easily across national boundaries. The migration of medical personnel, primarily from poor to rich countries, is another aspect of the diffusion that has received little attention in current discourses on globalization. These themes are prominent in a sociomedical analysis of the case of Zahira Qetub, a young girl in an affluent Arab nation who, born with a severe congenital defect, eventually developed end-stage renal disease. She received technologically sophisticated treatment from many expatriate physicians at a teaching hospital. However, the difficulties of her illness, disability and treatment generated tensions between her, her family and the medical staff.