Colonial medical encounters in the nineteenth century : the French campaigns in Egypt, Saint Domingue and Algeria

This article will address the shortcomings of western medicine when faced with diseases of warm or ‘tropical’ countries broadly conceived, the influence of non-European medicine on French medicine and the borrowing from non-European remedies and drugs by French practitioners in the nineteenth century. It will focus on three specific colonial campaigns (Egypt from 1798 to 1801, Saint Domingue from 1802 to 1803, Algeria from 1830 to the 1860s) which illustrate particularly well the evolution of ‘medical encounters’ between French and non-European medicine in the nineteenth century. French medical encounters then went into three stages: exploration (in Egypt), appropriation (in Saint Domingue) and finally (in Algeria), assimilation and exploitation.