Medicine And The Saints Summary

Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa explores French colonization in the Maghreb region of North Africa, specifically: Tunis, Morocco, and Algeria. The book, unlike many of the others that we have read so far in class, focuses almost exclusively on the viewpoint of the controlling colonial power, rather than on the indigenous persons being ruled. Stripped of cultural context, these chapters provided a striking contrast to the narrative presented in the book Medicine and the Saints, which also discussed Moroccan colonization and medicine. In the first four chapters Keller explores the ways in which France used psychiatry and a supposed altruistic desire to save the “primitive” Africans from their decadence as a facade for their colonial interests, and the ways in which this manifested …show more content…
Psychiatrists such as Antoine Porot emphasized the barbaric, primitive, and fatalistic nature of Arabs and other non-European individuals, and used this as a justification for colonial rule. Freud claimed that they lacked a superego and were thus less civilized and more apt to anger, violence, and sexual deviance. These ideas served to dehumanize these populations and created a case for why their medieval societies needed to be saved by benevolent white overlords. Much of Keller’s writing in this book deals with the ways in which the Arabs in North Africa were characterized as less than human, in both academia and in their treatments in these asylums, and the ways in which this view of the Arabs as a primitive species resulted in French disenfranchisement and mistreatment of these populations. They quickly dismissed all things Arab as superstitious religious magic and were quick to confine those who acted outside of what was considered to be gentile in French society, all in the name of social