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Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on July 7, 2007
Social History of Medicine 2007 20(2):315-331; doi:10.1093/shm/hkm037
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved

Local Responses to French Medical Imperialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Algeria

William Gallois*

* Department of History, Roehampton University, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PU, UK. E-mail: w.gallois{at}roehampton.ac.uk


  Abstract

This article offers the first account of the lives of Algerian-born doctors working in the French colonial medical service between 1870 and 1900. Their stories reveal the manner in which the idea of medical imperialism had collapsed in Algeria, as a result of maladministration, racial policies, competition between civil and military authorities, budgetary constraints and the rise of the colons. The article also indicates the way in which medicine became a locus of opposition to French rule. It shows how the first decades of the Third Republic were critical in terms of a shift from the earlier idea of medicine serving as an emblem of the mission civilisatrice to the ideological potential of medicine being seen in much more nuanced terms by both French settlers and Algerian locals. It is argued that the notion of cultural resistance to imperialism through medicine emerges in the 1870s and 1880s, thereby prefiguring the work of Fanon and the Front de Libération Nationale's later analysis of the ‘sickness’ of colonial Algerian society.

Keywords: Algeria; France; colonial medicine; nineteenth century; ethics; doctors; North Africa; Third Republic; Sahara; Tuggurth


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