Colonial medical practice in Algeria degenerated into systematic fraudulent profit-taking.

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fanon’s broader depiction of the colonizer’s medicine as extracting rather than healing — parallels the plantation medicine extraction motif in his earlier chapters. — connects to: Colonial medical practice functioned as systematized piracy that defrauded patients; Regrouped Algerians deteriorated physiologically to the point that medication stopped working. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 100; Colonial medicine rationed by race, poisoning the colonized view of the European minority — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 448 (+4 more)

Related

• Colonial medical practice functioned as systematized piracy that defrauded patients (similarity 0.94)
• Accepting French medicine trapped the colonized within the whole colonial system (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial property ownership aligns doctors with the oppression and exploitation of the colonized (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial medicine enters colonized societies paired with racial humiliation. (similarity 0.86)
• Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation (similarity 0.86)
• Colonized peoples read colonial vaccination as a tool of subjugation (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial medicine’s ethical codes clashed with French authorities’ discriminatory policies (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial medicine doubled as an intelligence and torture apparatus (similarity 0.85)
• Tropical medicine reframed colonized Africans as biological threats justifying racial segregation (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial power structures standardize doctor-patient relations, destroying personal contact (similarity 0.83)
• The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial doctors interpreted Algerian pain as animal-like and undifferentiated (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial doctors ended up treating Algerian patients like animals (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial medicine rationed by race, poisoning the colonized view of the European minority (similarity 0.81)
• Algerians rejected colonial medicine not from ignorance but as resistance (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Colonial medicine rationed by race, poisoning the colonized view of the European minority #qualifies (0.60) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 448
• Accepting French medicine trapped the colonized within the whole colonial system #expands (0.55)
• Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation #expands (0.50)
• Economic dependence on property makes colonial doctors complicit in domination #expands (0.50)
• Colonial property ownership aligns doctors with the oppression and exploitation of the colonized #expands (0.50)