Historians of Egyptian nationalism have demonstrated how, in turn-of-the-century-Egypt, household management and the composition of the family became target of criticism. The poor state of Egyptian homes and families and the ignorance of Egyptian women were seen as detrimental to the nation's future and its ability to liberate itself from the yoke of British occupation. Similarly, as early as the 1880s, the human body became an object of reform. Physical exercise and modern medicine were deemed significant in fostering a national future. In turn-of-the-century Egypt, new medical discourses emerged, which medicalized moral and social concerns in the name of rationality and science. Scientific and medical journals, many of them founded and edited by Syrian émigrés, provided a lively platform for intellectual debates. Physicians, medical students and laypersons transmitted and produced medical knowledge and presented questions to the editors. To many of them, medical principles for managing one's body, household, kitchen, childbirth and childrearing, were the hallmark of national modernity. My lecture will use these debates as a background for discussing three of the "others" of this national modernity: hashish smoking, male masturbation and spirit-possession cults. The first two were associated with idleness and subsequent insanity, and both were gendered male. The third was associated with African women, and with spirit-possession practices that also entered elite harems in the second half of the nineteenth century. All three symbolized Egypt's backwardness; overcoming them was therefore not merely a personal but also a national endeavor. Focusing on medical articles, official reports and medical literature, I trace new ways of addressing these three practices, which turns from a moral to a medical concern. The hashish smoker, the masturbator and the possessed defied the rationalization of the male and female bodies. The discussion offered here situates medical discourse in the context of a tripartite colonial encounter, between Sudanese, Egyptians and British. In this encounter, Egyptians partially adopted colonial understandings of Egyptian and Sudanese practices – they saw spirit possession cults as corrupting both individual and national bodies, and saw the adoption of European medicine, and even leisure practices, as potentially strengthening and improving society. Egyptian intellectuals, moreover, did not merely adopt colonial discourses, but rather adapted them to create their own particular understanding of medicine and the body.