Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France
"The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France" examines the turbulent history of the ideas, people, and institutions of French colonial and tropical medicine from their early modern origins through World War I. Until the 1890s colonial medicine was in essence naval medicine, taught almost exclusively in a system of provincial medical schools built by the navy in the port cities of Brest, Rochefort-sur-Mer, Toulon, and Bordeaux. Michael A. Osborne draws out this separate species of French medicine by examining the histories of these schools and other institutions in the regional and municipal contexts of port life. Each site was imbued with its own distinct sensibilities regarding diet, hygiene, ethnicity, and race, all of which shaped medical knowledge and practice in complex and heretofore unrecognized ways. Osborne argues that physicians formulated localized concepts of diseases according to specific climatic and meteorological conditions, and assessed, diagnosed, and treated patients according to their ethnic and cultural origins. He also demonstrates that regions, more so than a coherent nation, built the empire and specific medical concepts and practices. Thus, by considering tropical medicine's distinctive history, Osborne brings to light a more comprehensive and nuanced view of French medicine, medical geography, and race theory, all the while acknowledging the navy's crucial role in combating illness and investigating the racial dimensions of health.
About the Author
Michael A. Osborne is professor of history at Oregon State University and the author of Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism.
Reviews
"An important contribution to our growing understanding of colonial and military medicine. The French story provides an illuminating contrast to its more familiar English counterpart. Osborne paints a finely wrought picture of a world of naval medicine and medical training heretofore obscured by our canonical focus on Parisian institutions, ideas, and practitioners; professionalization and bureaucracy can assume a variety of shapes, and Osborne's study provides a fresh contribution to the history of the professions as well as to the circumstances and rationales of French colonial policy" – Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University
"In this illuminating history of French colonial medicine during the long nineteenth century, Osborne shows how naval medical officers brought home the tropics and domesticated the exotic. Sensitive to the terrain of ship, port, and colony, naval physicians sought to chart the medical geography and racial diversity of the world. In widening our knowledge of the history of tropical medicine, Osborne crucially turns our attention to maritime France and thus provincializes Paris in the history of French medicine" – Warwick Anderson, author of "Colonial Pathologies"
"Deeply researched in a dozen archives, this concise book shows how nineteenth-century French naval and colonial medicine came to grips with an expanding empire and its bewildering assortment of peoples, places, and diseases. Osborne combines the study of institutions, individuals, and ideas into an elegant essay that everyone interested in the history of disease, health, and medicine will want to read" – J. R. McNeill, author of "Mosquito Empires"
