"French doctors in Egypt with Napoleon" Topic

"The time draws nigh when we shall feel that to truly destroy England we must seize Egypt." Thus wrote Napoleon Bonaparte to the French government one year before his army entered Alexandria in July 1798. Marked by battles won and lost, revolts and reprisals, propaganda and backlashes, the French occupation of Egypt lasted but three years. What remains of its martial ambitions may perhaps be traced in the pages of military manuals, but its legacy is not the work of men of war, but of doctors, scholars, and scientists—the Description of Egypt—a multivolume work on Egyptian antiquities, flora and fauna, geology, climate, diseases, town planning, politics, and economics. Bonaparte himself supervised the medical and sanitary preparations for his Campaign of Egypt. On the ground, his medical men strove to overcome a host of difficulties that beset the troops: dehydration, cholera, ophthalmia, plague, and more. By setting up hospitals and lazarettos (quarantine stations), studying diseases, and implementing hygienic initiatives, the French medical corps enjoyed some measure of success. At the newly created Institut d'Égypte in Cairo, presided over by the mathematician Gaspard Monge, French scientists and doctors held scientific meetings and published their findings. Meanwhile, subject to increasing pressure from British and Ottoman forces, the French military capitulated at Alexandria in August 1801 and were expelled. Muhammad Ali, the "Father of Modern Egypt," took power and instituted sweeping military, cultural, and economic reforms. Among his preoccupations were the organization of military and civilian medicine and the health of his people, and for this he recruited doctors and medical instructors from France to help modernize health care in Egypt. One such, Antoine Barthélémy Clot, a doctor and surgeon in Marseille, embarked in1825 for Egypt, where he spent over a quarter of a century. Soon after his arrival he cured Muhammad Ali of gastroenteritis, became his personal physician, and later was appointed chief health care administrator, and so by creating medical schools and hospitals laid the foundations of modern medical instruction and care in Egypt…"
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