Egyptian soldiers denied disease to avoid enforced hospitalization.

Evidence

Despite the benefits of routine medical examinations, there does not seem to have been any effort to convince the men of them or to enlist their support. Soldiers resented being so minutely examined by the doctors and often lied about their physical condition in order to avoid being sent to the field hospitals. For example, a general medical examination was once conducted on the soldiers of the 12th Infantry Regiment in Syria. The European doctors found that twelve men were infected with syphilis and 210 with scabies. None of them was sent to the hospital and they were still living side by side with the regiment at large. When the Egyptian doctors were asked why the sick had not been interned in the hospital as the regulations stipulated, they answered that whenever they asked them, the soldiers denied being afflicted with any diseases. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1153

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Egyptian conscripts resisted army medical inspections by denying their illnesses (similarity 0.89)
• Poor Syrian hospital conditions undermined the army’s disease-control orders (similarity 0.83)
• Structural failings drove disease control problems in the Egyptian army. (similarity 0.83)
• Egyptian soldiers faked illness to dodge frontline duty and stay in hospitals (similarity 0.82)
• Hospitalized Egyptian soldiers violently resisted medical authority. (similarity 0.82)
• Squalid living conditions and poor hospitals caused rapid disease spread among Egyptian troops (similarity 0.82)
• Soldiers’ venereal diseases drained the fighting force in Syria (similarity 0.81)
• Syrian field hospital conditions undermined all medical orders from Cairo (similarity 0.81)
• Humiliated soldiers rioted inside Egyptian military hospitals and fought doctors (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian military medicine asserted a self-declared right to inspect patients’ bodies (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian soldiers feigned illness to escape front-line duty. (similarity 0.79)
• Scabies and syphilis reached near-epidemic proportions among Ali’s soldiers in Syria (similarity 0.79)
• Algerians refused hospitalization until death was nearly certain (similarity 0.78)
• Scabies spread because logistics failed to supply soldiers with clean uniforms (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Hospitalized Egyptian soldiers violently resisted medical authority. #complicates (0.60) — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1157