French colonial medicine in Cambodia: reflections of governmentality

Abstract

Studies of colonial medicine, mostly from former British colonies, have shown that colonial medical interventions mostly benefited the European colonisers and often had very little positive effects on the health of the native populations at large. A common assumption is that this was also the case for French colonial medicine in general, and for colonial medicine in Cambodia in particular, and that the unsatisfactory contemporary state of the medical services in the country may be partly explained by its colonial past. As a way to test this assumption, this paper presents an ethnography of colonial medicine in Cambodia in the first decades of the twentieth century. Documents in the Cambodian National Archives provided the primary sources, and their significance was assessed against the background of the authors' experience of medical anthropological research in contemporary Cambodia. Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality is used as the interpretative frame. Elements of colonial governmentality in the medical field included the promotion of modern medicine through the free dispensing of medicines and medical treatment and rudimentary medical training of members of the local population, as well as compulsory vaccinations and surveillance of the colonial subjects. It is concluded that both the idea of medicine as a ‘tool of empire’ and that of the colonial physician as a humanitarian hero are equally incomplete as general descriptions, and that specific ethnographies of medical policies and practices should be undertaken for particular colonial settings. This paper provides the first anthropological account of colonial medicine in Cambodia.