Egyptian moralists medicalized poverty as diagnosable social disorder in 1902

Evidence

In the café, as in the bar and the brothel, the particular ‘disorders’ of the crowd could be diagnosed – the first and most prevalent of which was always indolence and unemployment. In 1902 the work in Arabic on The Present State of the Egyptians, or, The Causes of Their Retrogression by Muhammad Umar discussed at length some of the further consequences of this indolence and these new forms of social life, including alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity, disease and insanity. All of these were spreading alarmingly, the book said, especially among the poor. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 376

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the conceptual framework of ‘social diagnosis’ — treating indolence, unemployment, and addiction as symptoms of crowd disorder rather than economic conditions.
• SEED: Angle: how the medicalized language of ‘diagnosis’ for social problems legitimized elite management of the poor in Egypt, parallel to contemporary ‘epidemic’ framing of social issues.