Colonial medical practice functioned as systematized piracy that defrauded patients

Evidence

Medical practice in the colonies very often assumes an aspect of systematized piracy. Injections of twice-distilled water, billed as penicillin or vitamin B-12, chest X-rays, radiotherapy sessions “to stabilize a cancer,” given by a doctor who has no radiological equipment, are examples. In the latter case, the doctor need only place the patient behind a sheet and after 15 or 20 minutes announce that the session is over. It even happens that doctors in rural centers (several examples of this in Algeria are known) boast of taking X-rays with the aid of a vacuum cleaner. We may mention the case of a European doctor practicing in Rabelais (in the region of Orléansville) who explains how he manages, on market days, to earn more than 30,000 francs in the course of a morning. “I fill three syringes of unequal size with salt serum and I say to the patient, ‘Which injection do you want, the 500, the 1000 or the 1500 franc one?’ The patient,” so the doctor explains, “almost always chooses the most expensive injection.” — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 465 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial medical practice in Algeria degenerated into systematic fraudulent profit-taking. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 465; Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation

Related

• Colonial medical practice in Algeria degenerated into systematic fraudulent profit-taking. (similarity 0.94)
• Colonial medicine doubled as an intelligence and torture apparatus (similarity 0.83)
• Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial medicine enters colonized societies paired with racial humiliation. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial medicine’s ethical codes clashed with French authorities’ discriminatory policies (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial property ownership aligns doctors with the oppression and exploitation of the colonized (similarity 0.81)
• Colonized peoples read colonial vaccination as a tool of subjugation (similarity 0.80)
• Accepting French medicine trapped the colonized within the whole colonial system (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial doctors ended up treating Algerian patients like animals (similarity 0.80)
• Tropical medicine reframed colonized Africans as biological threats justifying racial segregation (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial power structures standardize doctor-patient relations, destroying personal contact (similarity 0.79)
• The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial doctors reduced colonized patients to animals to justify brutal care (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial doctors interpreted Algerian pain as animal-like and undifferentiated (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial medical practice in Algeria degenerated into systematic fraudulent profit-taking. #corroborates (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 465
• Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation #expands (0.50)