Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

The 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 problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor’s murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

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Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

The 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 problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor’s murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

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Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956
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Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

Overview

The 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 problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor’s murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780292754812
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publication date: 08/15/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 350
File size: 22 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Ellen Amster is Associate Professor of Middle East History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a specialist in French and Islamic medicine. Her research includes global health, non-Western health and healing systems, women's studies, the history of North Africa, and French imperialism in the Islamic world. She has been a simultaneous translator for an ORBIS ocular surgery mission and a researcher at the National Institute of Hygiene in Morocco, and she also created a global women's health program in Morocco.

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

What People are Saying About This

Susan Gilson Miller

This first book from an exciting new figure in the field of Islamic medical history offers a fresh look at how the Moroccan ‘body’ became the site for competing influences leading to a political and scientific modernity. The clear prose, creative use of sources, and historical accuracy are exemplary. Nor will the reader be bored; the narrative is full of twists, turns, and unexpected surprises that engage the mind and stimulate the imagination, regardless of one’s disciplinary orientation.

Nancy Gallagher

This book is a significant contribution to the field with much new information and original archival research. It brings together earlier work on colonial medicine in Morocco and gives the reader a new appreciation of the importance of medicine and public health in the colonial encounter and in the nationalist resistance movement, and in the state building that followed. It adds to the study of gender and empire, showing how the colonial authorities manipulated the health and well-being of indigenous women for their political interests. . . . It will be well received by scholars interested in the history of the Maghrib and Middle East, Islamic medicine, Sufism, French Empire, and gender, health, and empire.

Richard Keller

This is a dazzlingly good book. Amster takes us on a bewildering tour of medicine and public health in colonial Morocco in a pioneering study. Health was a critical site of contestation in the protectorate. . . . The differences of authority between doctor and patient were dramatically exacerbated by the gulfs of power in the colonial state. Western biomedical and local Islamic epistemologies produced enormous conflict, and yet opened a critical space of resistance to colonial rule. . . . As opposed to those who would find in colonial medicine a demon of oppression, or those who would use it to excuse colonial excesses, Amster has produced a nuanced study that opens an important window on the enormous complexity of medicine and public health as a staging area for the colonial encounter. Among other critical elements of the book, she places the intersection of gender and religion at the forefront, making this a truly notable addition to the literature.

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African Studies
North African History
General & Miscellaneous North African History

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