New Perspectives on the History of Medicine in Colonial Algeria
Panel 001, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, October 10 at 5:30 pm
Panel Description
The intersections of French colonial power and the theory, practice, and institutions of medicine and social welfare have received considerable attention from historians of colonial Algeria. Beginning with Yvonne Turin’s 1971 study of schools, medicine, and missionaries, a rich body of scholarship has explored the contributions of medical personnel and modern therapeutics to the conquest of Algerian land and souls, the creation of viable colonial settlements, and the elaboration of a racially stratified political order.
In recent years, scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – employing new methodologies and drawing on newly-accessible archival materials – have sought to shift the terms of the debate beyond institutions of the colonial state and elite actors to incorporate local agents of social action, to capture transnational networks of biomedical knowledge production and humanitarian aid, and to explore continuities and ruptures in techniques of colonial biopolitics. Through a detailed and nuanced analysis of four historically specific episodes of medical relief in twentieth-century Algeria, this panel adds new complexity to our understanding of Algerians’ experiences of the disruptions caused by three major wars, and poses challenging questions to existing interpretations of the relationships between medicine, the colonial state, and Algerian society.
Paper A examines the social origins of medicalization in rural Algeria during the First World War. The paper interrogates ‘shikaya’ documents addressed to the French Prefect of Constantine to highlight how Europeans and Algerians could act in concert to make welfare demands on the state, turning the tables on colonial biopolitics.
Paper B focuses on the ‘médecin de colonisation,’ a key figure in the history of Algerian colonial medicine. By analyzing conflicts between French doctors and Algerian and female medical subordinates from 1918 to 1939, the paper illuminates how the colonial government sought to adjust to new post-war realities.
Paper C studies American intervention in Algeria from 1943 to 1945 from the viewpoint of Catholic missionary providers of medical services to ‘native’ Algerians. This investigation of how the White Fathers’ relief programmes responded to the ‘Americanisation’ of humanitarian aid improves our understanding of long-term trends in the provision of relief in Algeria.
Paper D analyses the efforts of French Army female Medico-Social teams to remake Muslim women as ‘modern’ ‘French’ subjects during the Algerian War. By drawing attention to a seemingly anodyne social welfare programme, the paper contributes to our understanding of French psychological warfare and the conditions that favoured support for the FLN.
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.
From 1853 the profession of "Médecin de Colonisation" (Doctor of Colonization) was organized in Algeria to serve the so-called "territories of colonization". These doctors, the majority of them French, many former medical officers of the Army, were placed in charge of vast medical districts. At the beginning of the twentieth century with the birth of the "Assistance médicale indigène" ("native" medical care) these doctors were assisted by "auxiliaires médicaux indigènes" ("native" medical auxiliaries"). The First World War and the exigencies of the post-war era gave rise to new sanitary formations, such as the “Assistance aux mères et aux nourrissons” (Assistance for mothers and infants), which introduced into the colonial medical landscape of Algeria a new actor: the “Infirmière-visiteuse coloniale” (colonial district nurse). The relationships between these agents of colonial health were complicated, conflicted and entangled, as doctors of colonization attempted to reimpose their influence over their subordinates, native medical auxiliaries, who had been the privileged interlocutors of rural populations during the war.
How were these conflicts translated in the organization of the profession of Doctor of Colonization? How did they play out on the ground, in the daily work of these men and women? The colonial archives are rich in many episodes of conflict and reorganization. This paper draws on these episodes to highlight the difficulties of trying to manage a colonized society in a state of constant change, in which the place of "natives", but also women, in the colonial order was in question.
This paper studies the American intervention in French controlled Algeria from the view point of the relief given to ‘native’ Algerians by missionary providers between 1943 and 1945. Using the archives of the White Fathers (missionnaires d’Afrique) this paper uses the material to present a snapshot of the Christian religious medical provisions provided in Algeria under French dominance. The paper will focus on the transformative and normative qualities of the American intervention as well as the range and limitation of this intervention in a complex colonial medical environment. The paper will argue that the ‘americanisation’ process with its focus on indigenous patients rather than colonial settlers fitted with a much older and broader trend in the provision of relief in Algeria. Nevertheless, the paper will also argue that the normative issues relating to accountability practices narrowed down the range of interventions and the missionaries’s possibilities for political autonomy in the fast moving transformation of Algeria. This paper is based on archival work but will also engage with the historiography of humanitarian aid and the historiography of colonial medicine.
In 1957, in the midst of a growing national revolution, the French Army launched a novel program: all-female Itinerant Medical-Social Teams, or EMSI. By 1959, the EMSI had become a central aspect of the French Army’s efforts to pacify Algeria’s Muslim population. Composed of ‘European’ and indigenous social assistants and accompanied by arabophone North African auxiliaries, the EMSI roamed the Algerian countryside, ostensibly aiming to ameliorate the poor living conditions of rural Muslim women and to promote their social evolution through the teaching of hygiene, infant care, and domestic skills. But while the surface activities of the EMSI appeared anodyne, their intended goal was not. French Army strategists saw Muslim women—whom they perceived as a dominated, cloistered victim of ‘traditional’ Algerian society and the unwitting key to its reproduction—as both a susceptible population for rallying to the French cause and a key point of action for effecting wider social change. By cultivating Muslim women physically, socially, and culturally, French Army officials hoped to engineer loyal and obedient Muslim citizens and revolutionize the colonial social order.
The EMSI did not seek merely to control or propagandize; rather, they also sought to transform Muslims into French men and women by inculcating ‘Frenchness.’ Part of a wider array of psychological warfare programs in Algeria aimed at integrating Muslims into the French national community, the EMSI attempted to reduce differences between Muslims and ‘native’ Frenchmen by transforming ‘Muslim’ habits and bodies into something more European. By doing so, Army officials reasoned, they could resolve the nationalist challenge once and for all by provoking a rapprochement between Algeria’s colonizing and autochthonous populations and creating a harmonious and egalitarian “New Algeria” free of the social inequalities and racial tensions that had previously marked French rule.
This paper will explore activities of EMSI in wider context of the effort to reinvent French rule in Algeria. How did military officials attempt to use hygiene and social welfare to remake Muslim women as ‘modern’ French subjects? How did the experience of the EMSI—for both its members and colonized subjects with whom the teams came into contact—contribute to the growing populism of the FLN’s struggle for Algerian independence? In the context of the struggle over national sovereignty, medicine and social welfare provided French Army officials more than a tool for social wellness; they became a weapon to inoculate Algeria’s Muslim population against the threat of nationalism.
