Abstract
Historians have in recent years increasingly questioned standard assumptions about the relationship between science and imperialism. For decades, scholars characterized colonial scientific development as following an established pattern of gradual diffusion as knowledge and innovation moved outward from Europe to the margins of empire.1 By these accounts, activity at the periphery consisted of simple datagathering and specimen-collection, dependent upon and derivative from the center, where prestigious institutions, associations, and organizations confirmed findings and generated conclusions. By the same token, the only legitimate scientific pathway from colony to colony passed through metropolitan sites like London, Paris, and Amsterdam, hubs for the dissemination of imperial knowledge. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines now see a more complex interaction unfolding under imperialism. The entrepreneurial spirit of many settler scientists, the uses of science and technology in the ideological defense of domination, and the lack of professional scrutiny in many colonial settings created unique opportunities for experimentation and innovation.2 According to much of this work, overseas territories served as vast laboratories for testing and perfecting a range of medical, scientific, and social projects before their implementation in European settings.3
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Notes
See especially George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science,’ Science 156, 3775 (1967) 611–22.
On the changing historiography of colonial science, see Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, ‘Science and Imperialism,’ and Lewis Pyenson, ‘Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences Revisited,’ Isis, 84 (1993) 91–108.
Key examples include Roy MacLeod, ‘On Visiting the “Moving Metropolis”: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,’ Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, ed. Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (Washington, DC: 1987), pp. 217–49;
Kim Pelis, ‘Prophet for Profit in French North Africa: Charles Nicolle and the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, 1903–1936,’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71, 4 (1997) 583–622;
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modem India (Princeton: 1999);
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: 1990);
Peter Redfield, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (Berkeley: 2000);
Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (New York: 1997);
and several essays in Roy MacLeod, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (Osiris, Second Series, vol. 15; Chicago: 2001).
See especially Paul Rabinow, ‘Techno-Cosmopolitanism: Governing Morocco,’ in French Modem: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: 1995), pp. 277–319;
and Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: 1991).
For critical responses to these arguments, see Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: 1997); and Daniel J. Sherman, ‘The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism,’ French Historical Studies, 23 (2000) 707–29.
J.C. Carothers of Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi attracted some significant attention with a range of publications, but his case was anomalous; see Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: 1992);
Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the African Mind’ (New York: 1995);
and Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Rhodesia (Berkeley: 1999).
For India, see Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800–1858 (New York: 1991);
and James H. Mills, Madness, Cannabis, and Colonialism: The ‘Native Only’ Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–1900 (London: 2000).
Concerning the last example, see Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (New York: 1987), p. 297; she notes that provincial deputies objected that the law governing the confinement of the insane was ‘cut to the measure of the capital’ and only applied ‘with great difficulty to the provinces,’ where facilities remained sparse.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (New York: 1963).
See especially Robert Berthelier, L’homme maghrébin dans la littérature psychiatrique (Paris: 1994).
For examples of this rhetoric, see anonymous letter to the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères; Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (MAE), Paris: Maroc 1283, M-63–3; and Lwoff and Sérieux, ‘Sur quelques moyens de contrainte appliqués aux aliénés au Maroc,’ Bulletin de la Société clinique de médecine mentale 4 (1911): 168–74.
Antoine Porot, ‘Résultats d’une expérience de “Service ouvert” pour psychopathes en Tunisie,’ Informateur des aliénistes 18, 5 (May 1923): 111–4.
On the conservative nature of the French psychiatric community, see Jean-Bernard Wojciechowski’s two-volume Hygiène mentale et hygiène sociale (Paris: 1997), esp. volume II: La Ligue d’Hygiène et de prophylaxie mentales et l’action du docteur Edouard Toulouse (1865–1947) au cours de l’entre-deux-guerres.
See also Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France (2 vols: Paris: 1982–85).
Marise Périale, Maroc à 60 Kms à l’heure (Casablanca: Réunies, 1936), 234, and ‘Les formations neuro-psychiatriques du Maroc,’ Paris Médical, 25 January 1936, 86; ‘Le traitement des aliénés en Algérie,’ Echo d’Alger, 3 July 1933, 3.
See also Raoul Vadon, ‘L’Assistance médicale des psychopathes en Tunisie’ (Med. thesis; Marseilles, 1935), 13, 51.
See Françoise Jacob, ‘La psychiatrie française face au monde colonial au xixe siècle,’ in Découvertes et explorateurs: Actes du Colloque International, Bordeaux 12–14 Juin 1992. VIIe Colloque d’Histoire au Présent (Paris: 1994), pp. 365–73.
Joseph Moreau (de Tours), ‘Recherches sur les aliénés en Orient,’ AMP 1 (1843), I.
Other literary references include Lady Stanhope, Alphonse de Lamartine’s ‘Circe of the desert,’ who communicates with Egyptians through her madness; Voyage en Orient, in Oeuvres complètes (40 vols; Paris: 1860–63), VI–VIII, 230. More recently, see Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (New York: 2001), which describes the toll of alcoholism and insanity on a British settler family in Rhodesia. For histories of the phenomenon, see Ernst, ‘European Madness and Gender in Nineteenth-Century British India,’ Social History of Medicine, 9, 3 (1996) 357–82;
also Johannes Fabian, Out of Their Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: 2000).
Although the theory lived on in different manifestations; see Warwick Anderson, ‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown,’ American Historical Review, 102 (1997) 1343–70.
On the formation of French settler identity, see David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (New York: 1990).
On this transition’s effects for racial distinctions, see Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: 1995).
On the effects of immigration into France for forging a ‘North African’ identity, see Mary Dewhurst Lewis, ‘The Company of Strangers: Immigration and Citizenship in Interwar Lyon and Marseille’ (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2000).
Steven Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of >Man (New York: 1996), pp. 105–75.
See Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: 1961);
Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modem France (Princeton: 1984).
For a wider view, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848–1915 (New York: 1989);
Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: 2000), pp. 46–60;
and Allen Thiher, Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature (Ann Arbor: 1999), pp. 195–223.
See Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (New York: 1991);
and David L. Hoyt, ‘The Reanimation of the Primitive: Fin-de-Siècle Ethnographic Discourse in Western Europe,’ History of Science, 36 (2001) 331–54.
Also Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: 1990);
and the much stronger James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: 1988).
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, in James Strachey, ed. and trans., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols; London: 1953–74), XIII, 102–61.
Louis Lauriol, Quelques remarques sur les maladies mentales aux colonies (Paris: Faculté de Médicine, 1938), pp. 55–6;
Georges Dumas, ‘Mentalité paranoïde et mentalité primitive,’ AMP, 92 (1934), I: 754–62;
and Pinkus-Jacques Bursztyn, Schizophrénie et mentalité primitive (Paris: Faculté de Médicine, 1935), 74.
Antoine Porot, ‘Notes de psychiatrie musulmane,’ AMP, 76 (May 1918), 377–84.
Paul Courbon, review of Porot and Sutter, ‘Le primitivisme des indigènes nord-africains,’ AMP, 97 (1939), II: 440.
A. Fribourg-Blanc, ‘L’état mental des indigènes de l’Afrique du Nord et leurs réactions psychopathiques,’ Hygiène Mentale, 22 (1927), 135–44.
J. Alliez and H. Descombes, ‘Réflexions sur le comportement psychopathologique d’une série de nord-africains musulmans immigrés,’ AMP, 110 (1952), II: 150–6.
G. Daumezon, Y. Champion, and J. Champion-Basset, L’assistance psychiatrique aux malades mentaux d’origine nord-africaine musulmane en Métropole: Monographie de l’Institut National d’Hygiène no. 14 (Paris: 1957).
Jack Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (New York: 1997).
Cerletti and Bini, ‘L’Elettroshock,’ Archivio generale di neurologia, psichiatria e psicoanalisi, 19 (1938) 266–68.
H. Baruk, David, Racine, Vallancien, and Mlle Owsianik, ‘Etude expérimentale chez le lapin et le singe des modifications de la circulation cérébrale dans le coma insulinique, l’épilepsie cardiazolique, l’électrochoc et au cours de l’action de la folliculine et du scopochlorase,’ Encéphale, 35 (1942–45), 81–89.
Maréschal, Ben Soltane, and Corcos, ‘Résultats du traitement par l’électrochoc,’ 341–43. In a brief aperçu historique on electroshock, Dr René Ebtinger, Aspects psychopathologiques du post-electrochoc (Colmar: Imprimerie Alsatia Colmar, 1958), 25, referred to this meeting of the Congrès as an étape marquante in the history of electroshock.
Maurice Porot and A. Cohen-Tenoudji, ‘Tuberculose et traitements psychiatriques de choc,’ AMP, 113 (1955), I: 376–408.
Also Maurice Porot, ‘Electrochocs et cardiopathies,’ AMP, 113 (1955), II: 814–21.
Maurice Porot and Pierre Descuns, ‘Etat actuel de la psycho-chirurgie,’ Afrique française chirurgicale, 13, 6 (1955), 525–37; 532. Joel Braslow has determined, for example, that physicians performed 245 lobotomies at Stockton State Hospital in California in the same period (1947–54), but this hospital held nearly 5000 patients. Blida, by contrast, housed only 2200 patients in 1955.
Henri Aubin, ‘Esquisse d’une ethno-psycho-pathologie,’ L’Algérie Médicale, 5–6 (1945), 174–9.
Antoine Porot, ed., Manuel alphabétique de psychiatrie clinique, thérapeutique, et médico-légale (Paris: 1952–96).
See, for example, the case of Zohra Ya., in Suzanne Taieb, ‘Les idées d’influence dans la pathologie mentale de l’Indigène Nord-Africain. Le Rôle des superstitions’ (Med. thesis; Algiers: Heintz, 1939).
Cited in Abdelhamid Bouzgarrou, ‘A propos d’une expérience de Transformation Institutionnelle au niveau d’un service de psychiatrie’ (Med. thesis; Tunis, 1978–79), Institut de Belles Lettres Arabes, Tunis; emphasis in original.
Antoine Porot and Charles Bardenat, Psychiatrie médico-légale (Paris: 1959), p. 305.
See Judith Swazey, Chlorpromazine in Psychiatry: A Study of Therapeutic Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: 1973), p. 79.
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Keller, R.C. (2007). Taking Science to the Colonies: Psychiatric Innovation in France and North Africa. In: Mahone, S., Vaughan, M. (eds) Psychiatry and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593244_2
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