Norfolk and Norwich medicine: a retrospect

large-scale relief programmes by themselves and on their own initiative. The role of the Rockefeller Foundation proved successful not only because of its willingness to act while other foreign bodies pondered and consulted, but also because of its political acumen-key figures in the Foundation recognized from the outset the need to work in close cooperation with the Egyptian authorities, and so did not face the suspicion and obstruction confronting other groups. Even those who might anticipate such results will remark on the crass politicization of the crisis. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, for example, attacked reform programmes, spread the rumour that serums sent from Great Britain were stale and useless, and argued that once female licentiousness and liquor advertising had been eliminated, this "challenge from God" would disappear. The Brotherhood, nevertheless, organized clinics and dispensaries throughout Egypt, but used them also for political purposes and sent thugs to attack the similar clinics set up by the communists, who envisaged their dispensaries as fledgling revolutionary units. King Farulq, the Wafd, and other parties all responded with manoeuvres aimed as much at each other as at the disaster facing Egypt, and the Americans and the British demonstrated more concern for their respective national interests and rivalries with each other than with the welfare of Egypt. The British were the target of practically universal Egyptian blame for importing the cholera of 1947 from India; Gallagher's efforts to resolve this hotly contested question ends inconclusively, largely because of the disappearance of all Foreign Office records on the matter. Egypt's other wars rests on a solid foundation of American and British archival materials, numerous collections of private papers and diaries, Egyptian government records, newspapers, and journals from the 1 940s, and most importantly, interviews with many of the key figures in the events at issue. Gallagher's study will undoubtedly prove to be of increasing importance for the use she has made of such interviews, and it is also worth noting that the book is profusely illustrated with political cartoons from the Egyptian press, as well as with photographs (mostly from private Egyptian collections) of medical relief work in progress. The defeat of cholera in 1947 marked the defeat of large-scale epidemic disease in Egypt, but Gallagher concludes with two chapters which cogently argue that in terms of positive measures the results could have been better. The programmes of the immediate postwar period reflected the widespread belief-particularly …