Description
Book SynopsisThe colonial encounter between France and Morocco took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956.
Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different prob
Trade Review
Medicine and the Saints offers readers a complex analysis and interpretation of French colonialism in Morocco... * American Historical Review *
Medicine and the Saints challenges the very notion of modernity and provides fresh insight into contemporary questions of post-colonial epistemologies of personal and social health. This book is essential for scholars interested in social life at the interstices of colonial-modern Morocco. * Social History of Medicine *
Table of Contents
- Foreword by Rajae El Aoued
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Colonial Embodiments
- Chapter 1. Healing the Body, Healing the Umma: Sufi Saints and God's Law in a Corporeal City of Virtue
- Chapter 2. Medicine and the Mission Civilisatrice: A Civilizing Science and the French Sociology of Islam in Algeria and Morocco, 1830–1912
- Chapter 3. The Many Deaths of Dr. Émile Mauchamp: Contested Sovereignties and Body Politics at the Court of the Sultans, 1877–1912
- Chapter 4. Frédéric Le Play in Morocco? The Paradoxes of French Hygiene and Colonial Association in the Moroccan City, 1912–1937
- Chapter 5. Harem Medicine and the Sleeping Child: Law, Traditional Pharmacology, and the Gender of Medical Authority
- Chapter 6. A Midwife to Modernity: The Biopolitics of Colonial Welfare and Birthing a Scientific Moroccan Nation, 1936-1956
- Epilogue. Epistemologies Embodied: Islam, France, and the Postcolonial
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
