Within weeks of Germany’s declaration of war on France on August 3, 1914, Algerians saw the hasty and ill-planned deployment of physicians to staff medical units at the Front, military hospitals, and POW camp infirmaries. The effects were particularly drastic in the east of Algeria: by the winter of 1914, the number of physicians active in the department of Constantine – an area the size of Portugal – had shrunk from 106 to only 42, leaving most of the region bereft of medical assistance. The absence of doctors compromised the operations of the colonial legal system and jeopardized the flow of migrant labor to the fields and factories of France, as well as destabilizing local economies. Above all, the crisis in medical personnel, in tandem with poor harvests and food shortages, led to soaring morbidity and mortality rates. My paper draws on ‘shikayat’ [complaints] and petition letters addressed to the French Prefect of Constantine during the First World War, as well as government correspondence and published sources from Algerian and French archives, to analyze the medicalization of Algerian society ‘from below’. I focus on two communities in Constantine – the commune mixtes of La Meskiana and Chateaudun-du-Rhumel – and the ways in which their populations responded to the removal of state-salaried doctors. My paper makes three overlapping arguments that complicate the historiography of colonial medicine in Algeria. First, I argue that local populations could enthusiastically embrace the tools of colonial biopolitics. In comparison to the departments of metropolitan France, and even Algiers and Oran, Constantine was severely undermedicalized before the war, and yet the withdrawal of meager medical services in these communes triggered energetic social action. Second, I explore the conditions in which rural communities united across religious, ethnic, and class barriers to clamor for the return of their doctors, despite an official policy of segregation of medical assistance and infrastructure between Europeans and North Africans. Finally, I demonstrate that French responsiveness to societal demands was closely connected not only to security concerns and the needs of the trans-Mediterranean war economy, but also to an emerging vocabulary of need – for medical attention, expert judgement, and drug supplies – shared by state and society.