Military doctors reframed homosexuality as a public-health cost to the state

Evidence

The shift to the final form of power, disciplinary power, can be detected by looking at the various letters and injunctions that Clot Bey wrote to address the issue of homosexuality in military schools. His main concern was with syphilis which, he said, was getting out of control since there was no law that forced prostitutes to be medically examined, prompting men “to replace them [i.e. the afflicted women] with a greater vice that is against human nature, by which we mean those young boys who, on the pretext of [public] dancing, commit what is improper [even] to be said.” What was of concern to Clot Bey, besides the affront to decency and public morals, was the cost to the government resulting from treating the syphilitic young boys, as well as the time they had to spend away from their lessons to be treated in the Qaṣr al-‘Ainī Military Hospital. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 731

Categorization

• XREF: The state economistic framing of vice ties to the moral-panic material and how institutions quantify behavior by cost.
• SHARE: The detail about syphilis driving men to pederasty, framed as a cost to government, is a niche historiographic gem for anyone studying medicine and empire.