Medicine and power in Tunisia, 1780-1900

About this book

"Severe epidemics of plague, cholera, and typhus swept across Tunisia between the years 1780 and 1900. The society was galvanized into action: medical practitioners, religious authorities, and political leaders all tried to deal with the deadly crises. Muslims had, over many centuries, evolved ideas concerning the origin, prevention, and treatment of epidemic diseases that differed somewhat from those of their European counterparts. With European economic and political expansion that accelerated after the Napoleonic Wars, Muslims found themselves confronted not only by a new source of political power but by a new set of medical ideas. This study traces the medical confrontation through the society's response to epidemic disease. Muslim political leaders were anxious to learn new medical practices and in Tunisia acted quickly to impose quarantines when news of epidemic disease arrived - following the practice in European ports. By the 1830s, however, European consuls dominated quarantine boards in most Muslim ports, citing the need for efficient controls; yet in Tunisia it was in fact the eagerness of the rulers to impose quarantines in the hope of protecting their territories that led to the takeover of the quarantine authority. Europeans did not want interference in their trade and travel. As European interests in Tunisia increased, medicine became a political tool. History was rewritten: Muslims became passive and fatalistic and so in need of European medical guidance. In the new version of history, Tunisian society had become impoverished not from European economic and political strangulation but from epidemics. This study suggests rather the opposite. The transition from Muslim to European medical authority was stimulated by the epidemics but was more fundamentally part of the onset of European political domination."