Medical topography as an instrument of colonial management in French Algeria, 1830–71

Abstract

The role played by medicine in colonial history has been underestimated, and even misunderstood. This chapter shows that, contrary to some prevailing assumptions, the main impact of medicine in the colonization process was perhaps not so much at the level of bodies as at another level: space. A different, population-based historiography is therefore necessary. This chapter proposes that because of its fundamental interest in the environment and space, Western medicine—contemporary with the colonial imperative—contributed to the domination of the European powers by making it possible to think of the fundamental spatial continuity of the world and therefore its conquest. Medical topographies, in the context of the conquest of Algeria by French armies from 1830, provide an exemplary source in which to explore this proposition. Algeria occupied a prominent place in French medico-topographical production: forty-one topographies were devoted to it, amounting to 7 per cent of all medical topographies handwritten and printed following the conquest, more than any other area of French territory. Medical topographers first began in those areas for which they were specialists, and which seemed reserved particularly for them: water and air. They then turned to mortality. Finally, I demonstrate that topographies were an ideological and legitimizing instrument. They demonstrate a marked imbalance between their concern with the health of the French soldiers and later of the colonists, and the health of the local population.