Medicine and the Saints
- Compte rendu de Zakaria Rhani
Publié le 25 juin 2014
Présentation de l'éditeur
Exploring the colonial encounter between France and Morocco as a process of embodiment, and the Muslim body as the place of resistance to the state, this book provides the first history of medicine, health, disease, and the welfare state in Morocco. 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, this book traces a history of colonial embodiment through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic Sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France, 1877 to 1956 : 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. Each chapter addresses a different theoretical problem in the history of science and thus draws upon a range of historical, anthropological, and religious studies methodologies.
Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in French and Arabic, Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, and historians ; a social history of the transformations occasioned by medical interventions ; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists, midwives, and ordinary patients have appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. This research reveals how Moroccans have ingested and digested French science and use it to create a modern polity and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body has become the seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contest and redefine the political.