This book is a history of the ideas, people, and institutions animating French colonial and tropical medicine from its origins through World War I. Until the 1890s most of what counted as colonial medicine was actually linked to or simply was naval medicine, an activity taught at schools in the port cities of Brest, Rochefort-sur-Mer, Toulon, and Bordeaux. The study utilizes Jürgen Habermas’s “lifeworld” concept and more recent place-based techniques to chart the emergence, modification, and eventual demise of this discrete and largely separate species of French medicine pressured by reform ... More

This book is a history of the ideas, people, and institutions animating French colonial and tropical medicine from its origins through World War I. Until the 1890s most of what counted as colonial medicine was actually linked to or simply was naval medicine, an activity taught at schools in the port cities of Brest, Rochefort-sur-Mer, Toulon, and Bordeaux. The study utilizes Jürgen Habermas’s “lifeworld” concept and more recent place-based techniques to chart the emergence, modification, and eventual demise of this discrete and largely separate species of French medicine pressured by reforms in medicine, education, colonial and domestic governance, and penology. The Parisian and civilian emphasis of French medical history merits re-evaluation. For colonial medicine and the study of “exotic pathology,” the action was not in Paris but in provincial naval ports, in the colonies, on the “great school of the sea,” and later in Bordeaux and Marseille. Provincial cities had very different resource endowments from what was found in Paris, and naval medical training and career patterns where vastly different from those of civil medicine although they intersected from time to time. It was, as its practitioners noted, a special or distinctive sort of medicine in virtue of its content, practitioners, patients, diseases, and places of practice. Considering its history enables a more comprehensive and nuanced view of French medicine, medical geography, and race theory. It also signals the navy’s crucial role in combating yellow fever, lead poisoning, and investigating the racial dimensions of health.