Medical imperialism: French doctors in Algeria

Abstract

Readers looking for a history of the medical infrastructures in colonial Algeria, the training and practice of colonial doctors, the sorts of diseases they encountered, and the types of prophylaxis, diagnosis and treatment that they used will be disappointed with this book. William Gallois is interested in the ideology of ‘medical imperialism’ (his term) from the initial French invasion of 1830 through the end of the century. His view is both uncompromising and polemical. Even by the 1870s, when the violence of the first decades of conquest had somewhat subsided, French policy remained ‘a continuation of an existing genocide, for the consequence of French policies of extermination, racialised governance, land appropriation, destruction of indigenous cultures and the ethical flaws in their systems of care which failed to attend to suffering, amounted to a genocidal programme’ (p. 141). Repeatedly, Gallois states that the French policy to the indigenous population was ‘exterminatory’ and ‘genocidal’, and he argues that French doctors were complicit in the slaughter. The underlying assumption, with obvious reference to the work of Frantz Fanon, is that ‘Algeria was made by the French as a sick state’ (p. 4); that is, medical ideas suffused French colonial policy in North Africa, that doctors by their sins of omission and commission took part in what may be perceived as genocide, and that the outcome was the existence of a colonized population both physically and psychologically traumatized by these actions. Medical practice betrayed the Hippocratic Oath, and medical policy betrayed French arguments about the beneficence of colonial civilizing and modernizing intentions. Even under the guise of humanitarianism, doctors were not innocent, and Gallois convicts them as accessories in the murderous project of colonialism. Gallois’ evidence comes from various contemporary writings by European colonial doctors, administrators and travellers (including letters) and several