Egypt's other wars: epidemics and the politics of public health

greatly to the health service education of the committee's perspiring secretary" (p. 64). An interesting retrospective of this period contrasts with a thin treatment of the 1940s and the transition to the NHS. While there has been substantial coverage of the high politics of this period, grass roots material on how the infirmary and its patients were affected would have been valuable. Given the subtitle "The people's hospital" and the emphasis on expansion, detail on these matters and on how the infirmary financed its growth is also appropriate. A popular "penny in the pound" scheme launched in 1883 was reckoned less than successful and its limits ascribed to "the careful nature of the Aberdonian". Is the subsequent story only one of grants and philanthropy? Overall this is a sound and very well produced treatment of the growth of a specific institution and its facilities. Chapters dealing with the rise of modem medical and surgical specialities in particular are clear and informative. The editors note that the era of Trust status and managers has brought to an end basic consensus within the hospital and the words "business plan" and "resource initiative" do not appear until the final page of the text. One can sympathize with their wish to leave discussion of such matters to "future historians". In the 1940s Egypt suffered a series of devastating outbreaks of epidemic disease: falciparum malaria in 1942-44, relapsing fever in 1946, and cholera in 1947. The first half of the twentieth century had seen other diseases afflict the country, but the epidemics of the 1940s were in one crucial respect unique. For all its importance to the modern medical profession developing in Egypt since the mid-nineteenth century, public health had never been much of a political issue. In the heady nationalistic mood of the 1940s, however, activists across the political spectrum were quick to conclude that their country suffered from epidemic diseases rarely seen in the West because Egypt was poor, underdeveloped, and colonized. The epidemics of malaria, relapsing fever, and cholera, which affected over 400,000 people and claimed nearly 150,000 lives, thus posed political as well as public health problems. For example, they drew attention to the wretched living conditions recognized as largely responsible for them. The result was a massive official and popular mobilization which not only eliminated the threat of major outbreaks of epidemic disease in Egypt, but also saw public health …