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Not Even Past

The Curious Case of the Thomas Cook Hospital in Luxor

Cross-posted from Chris Rose’s blog, where he regularly tells us Important and Useful Things and makes us laugh along the way. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Chris is the brains and motor behind our podcast, 15 Minute History.

By Christopher Rose 

Over the weekend, the Thomas Cook company went bankrupt and shuttered operations, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded worldwide and searching for flights home.

A number of us Twitterstorians became particularly concerned about the impending demise of the company a few days ago when Ziad Morsy, a martime archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southampton tweeted that Thomas Cook’s historical archivist had lost his job.

The Thomas Cook company was 178 years old when it collapsed (just over a month before Britain may or may not exit the European Union–coincidences which have been commented upon elsewhere). Some of its history in relation to British imperial history was covered by another colleague in a Twitter thread yesterday:

Inasmuch as it’s easy to point to the Thomas Cook Company’s early days as those of a commercial company essentially making money off of the expansion of the British Empire, there are occasional glimpses at a richer and more complicated role for the company in various contexts (@afzaque covers several of them in his thread, which is worth a read).

It’s these sorts of things that make the potential loss of the company’s archive particularly painful, as it is one of those out-of-the-box sources for material that can shed startling new light on historical periods.

And hence, I present …

The curious case of the Thomas Cook Hospital

I ran across the hospital while writing the first two chapters of my dissertation, which wound up comprising a comprehensive history of public health in Egypt between 1805 and 1914 as one did not already exist. (Wanna publish it? It’s not going to be in the monograph.)

The West Bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, in 2010.

It was located in Luxor, a settlement that is notable mostly for what people were doing there thousands of years ago, as it is built on top of the ruins of what was almost certainly not known to its inhabitants as Thebes, but was one of the New Kingdom capitals of ancient Egypt. Across the Nile River, wide and lazily flowing at this point, is the pyramid-shaped hill that marks the location of the Valley of the Kings.

Given the numerous pharaonic sites that dot the landscape up and down the river from Luxor, Cook had the bright idea to utilize boat travel for wealthy tourists to visit them without the hassle of having to move constantly to new hotels every night. Luxor, at the epicenter, was the site of the train station from which Wagon-Lits and other operators operated sleeper trains to Cairo.

In 1890, Luxor was a small town — perhaps five thousand permanent inhabitants, which could swell as high as twenty thousand during tourist season when there was work to be had.

John Mason Cook–the son referred to in the company’s official name “Thomas Cook & Son” after 1865 — had the idea to open a hospital as early as 1887:

In 1887, he decided, driven by the reactions of rich foreigners–British, American, German–in the face of the unfortunate hygienic conditions of the local population, to construct a hospital. “Accomplished in 1891, inaugurated by the Khedive Tewfik Pacha, it comprised 26 beds (of which 8 were for women, 10 for men)*, the buildings well constructed, each isolated from the other, in a healthy and fortuitous position.”

*(no, this doesn’t equal 26).

Jagailloux, Serge. La Médicalisation de l’Égypte Au XIXe Siècle. Synthèse 25. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilsations, 1986. (translation mine).

The hospital was co-directed by a Syrian doctor and an Englishman (only the latter–a Dr. Saimders–is named). Given that neither were in residence in Luxor in the off season (April to November), a third doctor–an Egyptian–was appointed to see patients in the off-season.

It was estimated that over 120,000 patients were seen, with over 2,000 operational procedures performed, in its first twenty years of operation. The hospital was presumably built primarily for the treatment of visiting foreigners, with Egyptians working in the tourist industry as a secondary priority.

“One of the Dahabeahs (sic) of Thos. Cook & Son Company (Egypt)”
Berlin: Cosmos art publishing Co., 1893.
Collection of the Brooklyn Museum

What is interesting is that, with Cook’s blessing, the hospital was opened to the public as well. In 1898, The Lancet enthusiastically reported that people were coming from over two hundred miles away to seek treatment at the facility. (“Egypt.” The Lancet 152, no. 3905 (July 2, 1898): 59.)

After the British occupation in 1882, funding for public health flatlined. Under Lord Cromer, the public health budget never exceeded 100,000 Egyptian pounds (at the time LE 1 = £0.95).

Hospitals in the provinces, which were already run down and developing a bad reputation among patients (most of them had been built in the 1840s), were frequently closed or moved to other, newer buildings that were not purpose-built to serve as hospitals.

The construction of private facilities was encouraged by the Anglo-Egyptian government; the government would not open new hospitals or dispensaries (a combination pharmacy/clinic used to supplement hospitals in smaller settlements) in towns that had “good” private facilities. Many of the hospitals were funded by local European communities to serve their own–Austro-Hungarians, French, Greeks, Italians, and Anglo-Americans all had their own facilities in Cairo and/or Alexandria, most of which referred their Egyptian patients to government facilities.

Hence, it is a point of curiosity for me as to what inspired John Mason Cook to open his hospital to the general public, especially given that his company did not lack for wealthy clientele to fill its beds.

It suggests that, even at the height of imperialism, with a company that can (and has) be considered an agent of an imperial power, things are never quite as simple as they might seem.

As I was writing this, Ziad tweeted me this tantalizing entry from the archival catalog:

 

https://twitter.com/ziad_morsy/status/1176877234487009281?s=20

Hence, the answer to my questions may lie in this box, whose future is now in doubt.

What you can do to help

If you’re one of us history types who has benefitted, or could benefit, from consulting the Thomas Cook archives, this thread has specific action items you can take to let people know that there is interest in saving the archive and not letting its contents be dispersed or destroyed.

More by Christopher Rose:

You’re Teaching What?
Wrong About Everything
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement
Exploring the Silk Route

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Fandangos, Intemperance, and Debauchery

Black and white print depicting the Town of Sanantonio de Bexar

By Ben Wright

“Can any good come out of San Antonio?” This was the question at the heart of an 1846 letter penned by the Rev. John McCullough. He was writing to his Presbyterian superiors on the East Coast, who had assigned him the task of conducting missionary work on the new American frontier in Texas.

McCullough’s letter, housed on the UT Austin campus at the Briscoe Center for American History, is colorful, detailed and dour, providing a rare first-hand account of a fledgling Texas community caught in the crossfire of the Mexican-American War.

Photograph of a letter by Rev. John McCullough
McCullough’s letter, housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

McCullough describes San Antonio as a cosmopolitan merchant town of 4,000 people, the majority being Mexican, with Anglos, Germans, and French making up the remainder. He notes that the city was filled with “traders from the Rio Grande,” as well as medical tourists — “travelers” there for health reasons. In addition, the town was “thronged with strangers” — a testament to the presence of 2,000–3,000 newly arrived U.S. troops. The mix of troops, tourists, merchants and locals created a moral landscape that made McCullough recoil.

For the Reverend, San Antonio was a place full of “people exhibiting intemperance and uttering blasphemy.” Gambling was the “prevailing vice,” the sabbath was ignored and locals engaged in a “species of night frolics called fandangos.” It was also a place where priests kept cockerels “shod for fighting” in the church annex. Such men-of-the-cloth also had “a respectable posterity” of children “scattered throughout town.”

Black and white print entitled Sketches in San Antonio--The Fandango--From A Sketch by Our Own Correspondent
Fandangos were a source of revenue for San Antonio, raising $560 in 1847, 10 years after a licensing scheme had been passed (by a council consisting of Anglos and Mexicans).

McCullough obviously experienced a significant degree of culture shock on the frontier. Of the other remaining accounts of San Antonio during the period, most are morally neutral, even celebratory.  For example, in 1828, José María Sánchez and the botanist Jean Louis Berlandier passed through, Sánchez noting without prejudice that the “care-free” people were “enthusiastic dancers” while Berlandier spoke dancing as “the chief amusement among the lower classes.” In 1845, the traveler Frederic Benjamin Page described San Antonians as a people for whom “music and dancing, hunting and the chase, cards and love make up their whole existence.” In 1857, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. cheerily recalled a “jumble of races, costumes, languages and buildings,” a “free and easy, loloppy sort of life,” populated by women whose dresses “seemed lazily reluctant to cover their plump persons.”

A print featuring a large map of San Antonio from the 19th century

Undoubtedly, McCullough’s spiky moralism was influenced by personal convictions and a desire to secure funding for his missionary endeavors. Nevertheless, life on the frontier was precarious and often tragic — factors which may have fueled the preachy intensity. According to R. F. Bunting, McCullough’s successor, the San Antonio of 1846 was a “miserable and dilapidated place,” wrecked by war and preyed upon by “desperados” and “undesirables.” Indeed, McCullough survived several attempts on his life by those who took umbrage at his use of the pulpit to rail against gambling and saloons. He had some success setting up a local school but in 1849 his mental health was failing. The same year, his wife died in a cholera outbreak and he moved to Galveston to recuperate with family members. After recovering his faculties he founded a seminary for women with his two sisters there. However in 1853 Galveston endured a severe outbreak of yellow fever. The school closed down — McCullough lost both his sisters as well as a nephew and niece to the outbreak. Dejected and defeated, he left for Ohio.

Black and white portrait of Rev. John McCullough
A portrait of Rev. McCullough

Despite his moral indignation, nervous disposition and chaotic life, McCullough ultimately waxed optimistic in his account of Texas: “Can any good come out of San Antonio?” His answer was identical to the biblical passage of John’s gospel that he was paraphrasing — “with God all things are possible.” But his faith in Texas was material as well as spiritual: “no doubt … this will, in a few years be a large town.” For McCullough, the area around San Antonio had enough rivers (with enough girth and fall) to build “manufactories” that could “surpass Lowell,” the Massachusetts town that had grown rapidly into a manufacturing powerhouse in the first half the 19th century. He also mused that central Texas might one day be the “best cotton growing region in the world,” a comment that underlined his ambivalence to slavery as much as his penchant for speculation. (McCullough was from a staunchly abolitionist family and preached to black congregations throughout his life. However one early 20th century account of him adds — rather euphemistically — that he “accepted southern culture.”) Perhaps it was his optimism about Texas that led to his return later in the decade. During the 1850s McCullough had married again (to a woman whose extended family owned several slaves) and apparently settled for a quiet life in Ohio as a salaried minister. But at some point in 1859, he decided to mess with Texas once more, moving to Burnet County in a wagon carrying his family and grand piano, and with plans, according to the Southwestern Presbyterian, to “preach in that destitute region” and found another school. It turned out to be a disastrous decision. The Civil War disrupted his fundraising and left him bankrupt. He died of apoplexy suddenly in 1870, leaving a widow and nine children. Obituaries remembered McCullough as a pioneer preacher and a kind man, despite the fact that his “attachment to principle [was] inflexible.” The adobe walled huts in which he used to teach English to street children had long since vanished from San Antonio’s streets. Today, he is commemorated by a five mile long stretch of tarmac north of Interstate 35: “McCullough Street.”

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