[1] The school was founded by the French physician Antoine-Barthelemy Clot (Bey) on the order of Muhammad Ali Pasha.
Muhammad Ali Pasha wished for the public to become vaccinated, and had founded a medical school for men in 1827.
However, the customary Islamic gender segregation made it difficult to enroll females in school, so Antoine Barthelemy Clot had to buy 24 Sudanese and Ethiopian girls in the Egyptian slave market to acquire students for his school.
The students were given a six-year program, in which they were instructed to read and write Arabic, to vaccinate against smallpox, to bleed, perform obstetric maneuvers, to treat and report cases of syphilis, to register births and deaths, aas well as to conduct postmortems on female corpses.
The hakımāt were popular because of this function they fulfilled in favor of gender segregation, but their status and salary was low.