Medecine et Colonialisme au Maroc sous Protectorat Français by Reda Sadiki (review)

The Moroccan author Reda Sadiki, who has a Ph.D. in medicine from the University Mohammed V in Rabat, has worked as a doctor in both Morocco and France. From this position as a medical authority, he has written a book on “Medicine and Colonialism in Morocco under the French Protectorate”, which was published in 2021 in Casablanca by the publishing house “En Toutes Lettres”. In this book, Sadiki covers the history of medicine in Morocco from the precolonial period to colonial medicine’s epilogue – the long-lasting effect that colonial medicine had on how Maghrebis in general and Moroccans specifically are still viewed in France today. His book is a clear – and successful – attempt at deconstructing the fact that colonial medicine’s role in Morocco is, both in Morocco and in France, still viewed positively today (p. 11). In his view, colonial medicine was not only an effective tool of colonial policy, but one of its “constitutive elements” in Morocco, “that is to say, an integral and substantial part of all stages” of French colonialism (p. 13). In the brief introduction to this book, Sadiki situates himself in the interdisciplinary field of “technoscience studies”, i.e. the social study of science and technology. In the introduction, Sadiki decries the almost hagiographic view of colonial medicine in certain historiographical accounts about Morocco. He explains this, partly, by the fact that the history of colonial medicine in Morocco was first written by the very doctors who had been entrusted by the French government with the mission to establish medical institutions in Morocco. Sadiki points to the inherent biases of this source material and adds that the first generation of historians, who studied aspects of France’s medical mission in Morocco, did not question the accounts and reports of these colonial doctors and consequently reproduced some of their biases. After the introduction, the book is divided into five chapters, which are ordered in a roughly chronological way. The goal of these chapters is the debunking of various myths about French colonial medicine, which, Sadiki suggests, have up to now not yet been deconstructed by historiography. One of these myths is the conviction that modern medicine had been introduced into Morocco by French colonialism, i.e. that Morocco had been, before the installation of the protectorate, medically speaking a virgin country. This myth both suggests that Morocco had languished in misery before the advent of these French doctors in 1912 and paints France as a saviour figure instead of the occupying force it was. Sadiki proposes that there had been a tradition of medicine during the “golden age” of Morocco (which he defines as the time under the Saadi Dynasty), but that, by 1912, Moroccan medicine had indeed