Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

236 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTthick, his sweat cold and abundant, and pain racked all his joints. The physicianwho came to see him examined him with a baton, at arm’s length, andprescribed cold water. Toward the end Renaud asked for pen and paper towrite his family.French soldiers attempted to minimize the spread of the disease with quarantinesand even body language. “We don’t encounter one another except withsuspicion, and carefully avoid touching one another or even being downwind ofone another,” Captain Thurman wrote in nearby Abuqir in late January. “Whenwe assemble, something that only happens in an emergency, we arrange ourselvesin a circle, keeping several feet away from one another. Promissory notes,orders, and letters are treated with vinegar and are picked up with a woodenpincer.” 30 Millet, in Rosetta, recalled, “This disease begins with a high fever,and afterward a huge headache, with a bubo or gland that rises in the groin orsome other juncture of one’s members, which is as big as an egg. When it hascome out, the stricken can hardly any longer be counted among the living. Iffour days, pass, there is much hope; but that happens only rarely. It is to that illnessthat we lost the greatest number in our army.” 31Soon the progress of the plague in Alexandria and the port cities took on “aterrifying character.” The French physicians began dying one after another.One officer joked darkly that as the news spread, the soldiers pursuing MuradBey in Upper Egypt “are more afraid of us than of the Mamluks.” It quickly becameimpossible to enter the small French military hospitals, and the strickenwho could afford it hired expensive Muslim hakims, or traditional doctorstrained in the Islamic version of ancient Greek medicine, to care for them. TheCanon, the medical textbook in the Greek tradition produced by the medievalMuslim physician and philosopher Avicenna, had been widely taught in Europeanmedical schools in the late medieval and even early modern periods. SomeMuslim medical thinkers had concluded that epidemics were spread by contagion,going beyond the ancient Greek emphasis on climate or astrology. Thegap between Western and Middle Eastern medicine was not as great in the1790s as we might now imagine, and the hakims had the advantage of practicalexperience with the disease.We cannot assume that the French were always contracting what we wouldnow call the plague, nor that they correctly perceived the sources of the outbreak.It is likely that the soldiers suffered from a range of diseases, includingtuberculosis, scrofula, and anthrax. As for plague, there are three sorts: of thelymph nodes, of the lungs, and of the blood. For the most part, plague is transmittedby fleas infesting an animal such as a rat. French troops alleged that they