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In The Doctor Who Would Be King Guillaume Lachenal tells the
extraordinary story of Dr. Jean Joseph David, a French colonial
army doctor who governed an entire region of French Cameroon during
World War II. Dr. David-whom locals called "emperor"-dreamed of
establishing a medical utopia. Through unchecked power, he imagined
realizing the colonialist fantasy of emancipating colonized
subjects from misery, ignorance, and sickness. Drawing on archives,
oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, Lachenal traces Dr.
David's earlier attempts at a similar project on a Polynesian
island and the ongoing legacies of his failed experiment in
Cameroon. Lachenal does not merely recount a Conradian tale of
imperial hubris, he brings the past into the present, exploring the
memories and remains of Dr. David's rule to reveal a global history
of violence, desire, and failure in which hope for the future gets
lost in the tragic comedy of power.
After the Second World War, French colonial health services, armed
with a newly discovered drug, made the eradication of sleeping
sickness their top priority. A single injection of Lomidine (known
as Pentamidine in the United States) promised to protect against
infection for six months or longer. Mass campaigns of "preventive
lomidinization" were launched with immense enthusiasm across
Africa. But the drug proved to be both inefficient and dangerous.
Contaminated injections caused bacterial infections that progressed
to gangrene, killing dozens of people. Shockingly, the French
physicians who administered the shots seemed to know the drug's
risk: while they obtained signed consent before giving Lomidine to
French citizens, they administered it to Africans without their
consent-sometimes by force. In The Lomidine Files, Guillaume
Lachenal traces the medicine's trajectory from experimental trials
during the Second World War, when it was introduced as a miracle
cure for sleeping sickness, to its abandonment in the late 1950s,
when a series of deadly incidents brought lomidinization campaigns
to a grinding halt. He explores colonial doctors' dangerously
hubristic obsession with an Africa freed from disease and describes
the terrible reactions caused by the drug, the resulting panic of
colonial authorities, and the decades-long cover-up that followed.
A fascinating material history that touches on the drug's
manufacture and distribution, as well as the tragedies that
followed in its path, The Lomidine Files resurrects a nearly
forgotten scandal. Ultimately, it illuminates public health not
only as a showcase of colonial humanism and a tool of control, but
also as an arena of mediocrity, powerlessness, and stupidity.
In The Doctor Who Would Be King Guillaume Lachenal tells the
extraordinary story of Dr. Jean Joseph David, a French colonial
army doctor who governed an entire region of French Cameroon during
World War II. Dr. David-whom locals called "emperor"-dreamed of
establishing a medical utopia. Through unchecked power, he imagined
realizing the colonialist fantasy of emancipating colonized
subjects from misery, ignorance, and sickness. Drawing on archives,
oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, Lachenal traces Dr.
David's earlier attempts at a similar project on a Polynesian
island and the ongoing legacies of his failed experiment in
Cameroon. Lachenal does not merely recount a Conradian tale of
imperial hubris, he brings the past into the present, exploring the
memories and remains of Dr. David's rule to reveal a global history
of violence, desire, and failure in which hope for the future gets
lost in the tragic comedy of power.
This book presents a close look at the vestiges of
twentieth-century medical work at five key sites in Africa:
Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya and Tanzania. The authors aim to
understand the afterlife of scientific institutions and practices
and the 'aftertime' of scientific modernity and its attendant
visions of progress and transformation. Straightforward scholarly
work is juxtaposed here with altogether more experimental
approaches to fieldwork and analysis, including interview
fragments; brief, reflective essays; and a rich photographic
archive. The result is an unprecedented view of the lingering
traces of medical science from Africa's past. Â
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