Historians lack evidence of Egyptian commoners’ response to modern medicine

Evidence

Impressive as all these measures might appear, we do not know how they were actually implemented nor how they were received by the soldiers. As far as the civilian population is concerned, very little is known about the response to the new and unprecedented ways in which people’s daily lives were managed by the medical establishment that the Pasha created in Egypt. A recent book on the history of the introduction of modern medicine in Egypt in the nineteenth century, for example, failed to take account of the reaction of the average Egyptian to such novel practices as vaccination, post-mortems and/or autopsy. It also lacked any information about the every-day functioning of the numerous health offices (makātib al-siḥḥa) which were established in Cairo in the late 1840s. Moreover, it paid no attention to the functioning of the various field hospitals that were founded in the different localities in Syria in spite of these being the first medical institutions that the earliest Egyptian medical students were employed in. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1119

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the reader’s goal of understanding how the Egyptian army functioned on the ground by flagging the evidentiary gaps against top-down pasha accounts.
• QUESTION: The health offices (makātib al-siḥḥa) established in Cairo in the late 1840s—their everyday functioning is noted as undocumented; worth chasing source material on them.