Anne-Marie Moulin

Patriarchal Science: The Network of the Overseas Pasteur Institutes

The growth of the Pasteur Institute into its overseas branches1 offers an intriguing case: a scientific imperialism which, although supported by colonialist lobbies and strongly flavoured with French chauvinism2, was not a mere by-product of 19th century expansion in Africa and Asia3. Two characters demonstrate the relative autonomy of this phenomenon. Firstly, the network of the Pasteur Institutes was initially established in both French dominions and foreign countries. Secondly, the network successfully outlived the toll of colonialism.

A hipótese vacinal: por uma abordagem crítica e antropológica de um fenômeno histórico

The article calls attention to the complexity of immunization by vaccine, from a perspective that combines the biological and social sciences and takes a critical view of current interpretations on the history of vaccination, whether negative or triumphalist. An anthropological look at vaccines and vaccination reveals the multiple historical and geographical facets of what appears to be a unique phenomenon, while also prompting questions about the kaleidoscopic unity of human practices. There is no single history of vaccination but a history of vaccines that have been used in different periods and countries. One consequence of this approach is that the concept of public resistance to immunization campaigns is replaced by acceptability, which suggests that selecting the procedures to employ when immunizing a given population is a hypothesis that should be evaluated based on history.

The Dilemma of Medical Causality and the Issue of Biological Individuality

Anne Fagot-Largeault has claimed that medicine still adheres to the Aristotelian paradigm of four causes while at the same time it tries to illuminate physico-chemical mechanisms as cause and effect sequences. This contradiction has been obvious since the so-called revolution of medicine at the end of the nineteenth century, and she makes her point with abundant quotations from Claude Bernard who found himself unable to stick to his own reductionist methodology. Fagot-Largeault rightly shows that this dilemma stems from the exceptional character of classical causal inferences in medicine of the Laplacian type which means when the cause A of B is the necessary and sufficient condition of B ([8], p. 9). The multi-factorial nature of causation in medicine is the main obstacle preventing a rigorously deterministic approach: but overall difficulties are added, due to the individual character of the organism, source of “major irregularities” ([8], p. 15).

Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877–1956 by Ellen J. Amster (review)

Ellen Amster’s book deals with the history of colonial medicine in Morocco between 1877 to the date of its independence in 1956. The author has tapped an impressive array of sources in the French archives and combined them with anthropological material from contemporary Moroccan society, resulting in an authoritative historical piece. Amster has chosen public health as a vantage point from which to describe medical science and Islam and to assess the promises and failures of the French program of reforms after occupation. Amster opens the narrative with the 1907 murder of Dr. Camille Mauchamp in Marrakech, suspected of poisoning patients with European drugs. This was not an isolated drama. In an article for MERIP, Jim Paul portrayed doctors in Maghreb as agents of colonial penetration and informers; some of them paid with their lives for the ambiguities of the medical mission civilisatrice.1 Administration in Morocco, conducted by Marshall Lyautey and his staff, has been depicted as modernizing, particular for urbanism and hygiene, with innovations even being transferred from the periphery to the metropolis, as described by Paul Rabinow in his French Modern.2 Ellen Amster has a different view: she holds that the French protectorate actually missed its targets and was unable to improve the sanitary situation of the population. She goes even further by suggesting that hurried modernization in Moroccan cities worsened the local conditions by far: the opening of broad avenues fractured the urban space of medinas, the development of new trades resulted in the decline of local crafts and the implosion of social solidarity, and the traditional organization of garbage collection and water pumping was irreversibly dislocated. Still more to the point, Amster shows that the modern institutions providing care to the destitute weakened the waqf system (charity foundations). According to Amster, the ideal formulated by Lyautey and his circle, modernizing without damaging the traditional culture, was self-contradictory and actually never worked. She goes even further by claiming that modernization ran counter to the French’s expectations and paved the way to their defeat. School education, instead of successfully spreading the gospel of the new citizenship, contributed to foster and invigorate local resistance and fueled nationalist dreams of recovered sovereignty, as illustrated by the program of Istiqlâl (independence) launched by Allal al Fassi in 1940. If the first axis of the investigation into the colonial enterprise is historical, the second is anthropological. For Amster, it is the Moroccan body, more than the urban landscape, on which the French state attempted to stamp its mark,

La médecine expérimentale au tribunal: Implications éthiques de quelques procès médicaux du XXe siècle européen (review)

the event.1 Yet, as valuable as it is, the book does have a few weaknesses. The most annoying is Weindling’s lack of a profound overall knowledge of the Third Reich. He should have been able to criticize the defendants’ argument that experimentation on concentration camp inmates condemned to death was legitimate: historians of the SS know that no one in the camp system was ever “condemned,” to death or otherwise, for they existed beyond the Nazi (regular) legal system and languished in the camps at Himmler’s pleasure. It constitutes yet another fault of the Americans that for their trial purposes they never bothered to find this out. Weindling writes that Albert Speer befriended Karl Brandt after the latter’s release from SS captivity in May 1945—but in reality the two men, both typical of the young and capable technocrats of the Nazi Order, had been close friends and collaborators for years. Weindling also gets a number of details wrong, including titles and university affiliations. And overall, this book could have been more compact and certainly more readable, had Weindling avoided the many repetitions. But those are small blemishes. This volume’s arguments and documentation are ground-breaking, and they should not be ignored by scholars working in the field of Nazi medicine.