ABSTRACT
The history of health care during the period of the French colonisation of Vietnam1 has long focused on the glorious battles against the major epidemic and contagious diseases of the region, battles waged through the construction of an extensive hospital network and through massive vaccination campaigns against smallpox. And indeed, such successes merit our attention: during a period of medical revolution, the French colonisers of Indochina were among the first to carry out wide-scale exportation of new Western health-care theories and practices which were to play a major role in redrawing the ‘morbidity map’ of Indochina, and in redefining the relationship of the Indochinese, individually and collectively, to health care, to disease, to disease-prevention, even to the state and to the West. There is no doubt that these successes played an important role in the global process of the medicalisation of indigenous societies. At the same time, these highly visible successes were only the tip of the
iceberg. A closer examination of the entire range of measures proposed and/ or undertaken in the health-care field reveals how they evolved over the course of the colonial period, adapting themselves in the process to indigenous pathological, geographic, economic and socio-cultural realities. This adaptation, which we might term a ‘nativisation’ is particularly apparent in the interwar period, and much of this essay will be given over to an examination of some of the more important achievements and shortcomings of this incomplete and ambiguous process. Such an approach will hopefully allow us to go beyond simply noting the gaps between health-care ‘theory’ and ‘practice,’ or between ‘colonial intentions’ and the ‘reactions of the colonised’. Our goal, in other words, is to understand what ‘modern’ medicine could realistically hope to impose on a non-Western society sharing few common points of reference and having its own well-established medical traditions.
