Attempts to prevent soldiers’ venereal disease failed because wives were permitted in camps

Evidence

After dealing in some detail with the problems facing the authorities in their attempts to cure the soldiers, namely the conditions of hospitals, the unqualified doctors, the unco-ordinated attempts of the bureaucracy in Cairo and the resistance of the patients themselves, what needs to be done now, by way of contrast, is to understand the causes behind the apparent failure to prevent diseases from spreading among soldiers. However successful the regimental doctors were in treating syphilis, the real problem lay in the authorities’ attempts to prevent the diseases in the first place. This obviously entailed a strict system of control of the soldiers’ sexual lives and a strong prohibition on women entering the camps or barracks, something that the authorities singularly failed to do. As said in chapter 3 above, as long as the regiments were still in Egypt, the families of the soldiers were allowed to join them and to follow them from camp to camp, but for health reasons this practice had to be stopped. Forbidding the soldiers from having access to their wives proved to be difficult to enforce, however, and some of the women disguised themselves as men and followed their husbands all the way to Syria. When the authorities insisted on forbidding the wives from accompanying their husbands, the men grumbled strongly “and in order to counteract the feeling of despondency as far as possible, the wives, concubines, and parents of the conscripts have been allowed to accompany them.” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1160

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the hygiene and disease-control problems of early conscript armies described elsewhere in this book.