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

Amster, Ellen J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292745443 ISBN 13: 9780292745445

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2013

Synopsis

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, 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 an interdisciplinary set of written and oral sources in French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians to transform Morocco; the social history of the encounters 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 have 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.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"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 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."(Richard Keller, Associate Professor, Department of Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

About the Author:

Ellen J. 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0292745443
• ISBN 13: 9780292745445
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350