To browse Academia. Hanan Hammad. Francesca Biancani. Nefertiti Takla. Christopher S Rose. On April 10, , Dr. Alex Granville, director of the Alexandria Sanitary Service, filed sent a letter to the Ministry of the Interior regarding the fact that prostitutes were being treated in a government Lock Hospital in the Moharrem Bey district of Alexandria.
Neighborhood residents, he reported, took exception to the treatment of prostitutes in their district and Dr. Granville demanded that the treatment facility be moved to somewhere less objectionable. During the period of the British occupation, prostitution was legalized and well regulated by the Department of Public Health.
Due to the influx of British troops during the war, the number of licensed prostitutes soared and special measures were taken to discover and treat both licensed and unlicensed prostitutes and, by late , specific areas had been set off where licensed prostitutes could operate.
With almost no exceptions, these red light districts were all located in Egyptian quarters of major cities—Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said, Ismailia, etc--away from neighborhoods where European administrators of the government and military were likely to live and to encounter them on a regular basis. A secondary factor of this relocation was that it theoretically made it more difficult for foreign troops to solicit the services of prostitutes and, when venereal disease infection rates became high among troops, to cordon off the red light districts entirely for a period of time.
What makes the complaint registered by Dr. Granville somewhat unique is that Moharrem Bey was a native quarter, and that the residents requesting the relocation of the hospital were native Egyptians, not Europeans. This paper aims to discuss the implications of relegating legalized brothels and licensed sex workers and their medical treatment into native Egyptian quarters during the war. While European attitudes toward these quarters—routinely described as filthy, miasmic, smelly, etc.
