One Hundred Years of Syphilis: Diseased Bodies in War and Peace in Egypt

On April 2, 1915, on the eve of being shipped out to the front at Gallipoli, Australian and New Zealand soldiers rioted in the prostitutes’ quarter of Cairo in what came to be known as the “Battle of Wazza’.” During their short stays in Egypt, Anzac soldiers had been infected with very high rates of syphilis and gonorrhea (or carried the disease with them to Cairo from stopovers in transit). Thousands of men were incapacitated at a time, with some three thousand men sent home by the end of the summer of 1915 alone. Venereal disease, not dysentery, became one of the most pernicious problems facing the British military command and medical officers in Egypt. Although the incidence of syphilis may have spiked in Egypt during the war, leading to the tightening of regulations for prostitutes, the disease had already left its mark on Egyptian society. This paper frames this episode in the context of a hundred year history of syphilis. Suddenly, one begins to see the disease everywhere: among Mehmed Ali’s soldiers in the mid-nineteenth century, in Cairene hospitals at the turn of the century, and in villages in the 1920s and 1930s in the wake of the war, whether spread by labor corps workers or prostitutes heading home. In short, syphilis had a huge impact on public health, contributing as it did to high rates of infant and child mortality and mental illness, as well as to understandings of sexuality and politics.