Severe epidemics of plague, cholera, and typhus swept across Tunisia between the years 1780 and 1900. The society was galvanized into action: medical practitioners, religious authorities, and political leaders all tried to deal with the deadly crises. Muslims had, over many centuries, evolved ideas concerning the origin, prevention, and treatment of epidemic diseases that differed somewhat from those of their European counterparts. With European economic and political expansion that accelerated after the Napoleonic Wars, Muslims found themselves confronted not only by a new source of political power but by a new set of medical ideas. This study traces the medical confrontation through the society’s response to epidemic disease.

Three devastating epidemics swept Egypt in the 1940's killing more people than all the wars Egypt has fought in the twentieth century. Egypt's Other Wars vividly reconstructs the nation's struggle against malaria, relapsing fever, and cholera and explores the unique combination of forces that put public health at the top of the national political agenda. Egypt in the 1940's as in the throes of a nationalist upheaval. Nationalists of all political ideologies attributed the sever epidemics that the country was experiencing to Egypt's status as an underdeveloped and colonized nation. The epidemics were therefore viewed for the first time as not only a public health crisis but also a political problem that called for a political solution.

Three devastating epidemics swept Egypt in the 1940's killing more people than all the wars Egypt has fought in the twentieth century. Egypt's Other Wars vividly reconstructs the nation's struggle against malaria, relapsing fever, and cholera and explores the unique combination of forces that put public health at the top of the national political agenda. Egypt in the 1940's as in the throes of a nationalist upheaval. Nationalists of all political ideologies attributed the sever epidemics that the country was experiencing to Egypt's status as an underdeveloped and colonized nation. The epidemics were therefore viewed for the first time as not only a public health crisis but also a political problem that called for a political solution.

This study traces Muslim-European medical confrontation through Tunisia's response to plague, cholera and typhus epidemics.