At this time, Qasr El Eyni Hospital had no department of obstetrics and gynaecology, and the only case of labour that he attended "ended fatally for both mother and child".

In June 1902, when Mahfouz was about to take his final year exams, there was an outbreak of cholera in Egypt and medical students were recruited to help combat the epidemic.

Within a week of the discovery of the well, the Mousha cholera epidemic had come to an end and so a nineteen-year-old medical student succeeded where a body of the ablest and most experienced British Public Health Department experts had failed.

His term of service at Kasr El Aini was extended by five years at the unanimous request of his colleagues at the department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

His pioneering work on the surgical repair of urinary and faecal fistulae brought him and Kasr El Aini hospital international acclaim.

The leading lights in his speciality came all the way to Egypt to watch him repair fistulae at Kasr El Aini and the Coptic Hospital, and he was invited to lecture and show films of his operations at the Universities of London, Oxford, Edinburgh, Geneva, and Lausanne to name a few.

In 1919, Mahfouz introduced the first antenatal clinics in Egypt, at the Kasr El Aini maternity hospital and in centres that he had opened in Cairo's deprived areas.

In 1945, the museum was described by the then President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of England, Sir Eardley Holland, as "a remarkable collection" and " a wonderful monument to the name of its founder".

[1] Naguib Mahfouz was a prolific author on a wide variety of subjects ranging from urinary and faecal fistulae, spinal analgesia, fibroids, ectopic pregnancy, gynaecological malignancies, pelvic infections and caesarean sections.

In 1935, he was elected honorary fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of England, an honour only bestowed on five eminent doctors at any one time.

On 1 July 1947, the Royal Society of Medicine of England bestowed its honorary fellowship upon Professor Naguib Mahfouz together with Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin, and an atomic scientist.

In 1960, President Gamal Abdel Nasser granted Mahfouz the First Class Order of Merit and the State Prize of Distinction for Science.