Arts & Culture
Damming the Nile and the devastating cost of human progress
In her upcoming Nauenberg History of Science Lecture, World Wounds: The Damming of the Nile River and the Transformation of Medicine, Associate Professor of History Jennifer Derr will explore how massive infrastructure projects contributed to widespread illness, and offer insights into the global history of medicine.
Before the mid-19th century, Egyptian agriculture was synced to the rhythms of the Nile River’s annual flood cycle.
Floodwaters gushed forth in late summer, spreading across basins, depositing nutrient-rich soil to feed crops of wheat, barley, and Egyptian clover.
The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 resulted in a massive dam-building project that altered the landscape, with drastic implications for the health of rural Egyptians, who were intensely exposed to potentially deadly parasitic diseases, including schistosomiasis.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Egyptian state went to great lengths to treat parasitic disease through the application of environmental chemicals and mass state treatment campaigns. As schistosomiasis spread across the globe with the construction of large dams, Egypt became ground zero for global public health research and experimentation.
In her upcoming Nauenberg History of Science Lecture, World Wounds: The Damming of the Nile River and the Transformation of Medicine, Associate Professor of History Jennifer Derr will explore how massive infrastructure projects contributed to widespread illness, and offer insights into the global history of medicine.
The lecture on April 7 at 6 p.m. at the Music Center Recital Hall is free and open to the public, with registration open for in-person or virtual attendance.
Derr’s first book, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt, won the 2020 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. In 2019, the National Science Foundation awarded Derr a CAREER award to support a broad research agenda concerning the “History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns.”
Derr’s forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Organ That Traveled the World: Medicine, Capitalism, and the Environmental Body, examines how environments shaped by capitalism have altered our bodies and informed the practice of medicine. In Egypt, liver damage became widespread—not from alcohol, as in Western contexts – but from parasites, viruses, and medical interventions. Derr researched and wrote a large portion of this book during a fellowship at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute in 2024-2025.
After the British occupied Egypt, massive irrigation projects made it possible for water to be stored and released at will, making the practice of agriculture year-round and fundamentally altering the rural environment.
Derr emphasizes that these environmental changes had direct health consequences. Canals built to channel water became sites of constant use and exposure: men worked in the water, women collected it, and children played nearby.
Yet these same canals also became repositories for waste. Their water and the moist soil around it were rife with harmful parasites, facilitating the transmission of disease.
Freshwater snails thrived in canals, some of them serving as vectors for the parasites that cause schistosomiasis. One variant of that disease can damage the liver severely if left untreated.
Attempts to control illness often worsened the problem. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Egyptian Ministry of Health treated schistosomiasis with injections delivered by glass syringes that were often poorly sterilized, inadvertently spreading hepatitis B and C.
Public medicine, instead of simply curing disease, became part of the problem, Derr explained.
When her project began, Derr initially focused on the devastating public health implications of dam-building in Egypt. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, the spread of viral hepatitis was a global story. As her research progressed, Derr began to connect Egypt’s history of medicine with that in the United States and Europe in the 20th century.
“The idea of informed consent in the practice of medicine is fairly recent and our knowledge of viruses more developed than in the 1950s and 1960s,” Derr explained. “In the second half of the twentieth century, hepatitis spread through deliberate infections as well as engagements with medicine that included blood transfusions, vaccinations, and other invasive medical procedures.”
In recent years, scholars and journalists have documented cases of deliberate and accidental hepatitis infections in the US and in Europe.
Derr’s research also interrogates the effects of chemical interventions.
Some treatments intended to cure schistosomiasis not only failed to stop the disease; they instead caused bodily harm.
Moreover, environmental chemicals have likely lingered in rural areas, impacting farmers in myriad ways.
Derr asks, “How did we build an infrastructure out of chemicals in the second half of the twentieth century, and how do these chemicals continue to exist and act on our bodies in unpredictable ways?”
The Nauenberg History of Science Lecture was established in honor of Michael Nauenberg, a founding faculty member in the Physics Department at UC Santa Cruz who came to the campus in 1966.
During his distinguished academic career, he contributed to a remarkably broad range of fields, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, chaos theory, fluid dynamics, and the history of physics in the 17th-18th century.
Professor Nauenberg deeply believed in the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship connecting the sciences with the humanities.
The Nauenberg lecture series features research by leading historians of science and highlights the significance of their work across disciplines for faculty, students, and community members.
The 2026 Nauenberg History of Science Lecture with Jennifer Derr on Tuesday April 7th is presented by the UC Santa Cruz Emeriti Association and co-sponsored by the Science & Justice Research Center, The Humanities Institute, the Humanities Division, the Environmental Studies Department, the History Department, and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA).