French West Africa realized the medical ideal metropolitan France had rejected

Evidence

Medical assistance in West Africa is more difficult to compare to metropolitan initiatives than public health legislation. Unlike the 1904 decree on public health, the AMI was not an adaptation of preexisting legislation in France. Certainly, in West Africa (as was not true in France), the delivery of medical care was entirely by the state. This arguably could not have been otherwise; but it is interesting to note how similar the federal authorities’ approach was to the hygienists’ thwarted ideal in France. The emphasis on building hospitals and dispensaries, for example, was the same system Parliament rejected when it passed the Medical Assistance Law of 1893. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1018

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my reading on French republican empire: the colonies became a laboratory where republican ideals impossible at home could be forcibly implemented.