Mehmed Ali’s stinginess undermined the effectiveness of his hospitals

Evidence

In that respect the Chief Physician of the army sometimes had the backing of the Pasha; more often, however, the Pasha in his typical thrifty manner would require him to make do with what was available. For example, when it was brought to his attention that students in the School of Medicine were issued with small uniforms that did not fit them, he characteristically answered that “each person has to extend his legs as much as could be covered by his trousers.” Another example of this stinginess had to do with what appears to have been a trivial matter, but one which was central for the performance of the medical establishment and the subject of a voluminous correspondence, namely, the quality of surgical bandages used to dress wounds. In spite of having a special book translated and printed in the Būlāq Press on that subject, doctors were constantly complaining about the bandages that were issued to them. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1086

Categorization

• QUESTION: The proverb about legs and trousers is a memorable rhetorical artifact that could open an essay on cost-cutting in 19th-century Egypt.
• XREF: This is a concrete Egyptian parallel to the reader’s reading on the performance of armies and the gap between blueprints and reality.