The Doctor Who Would Be King

by Guillaume Lachenal, Cheryl Smeall (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478022480
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/14/2022
Series:	Theory in Forms
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Guillaume Lachenal is Professor in History of Science, médialab, Sciences Po, Paris and author of The Lomidine Files: The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa.

Cheryl Smeall is an independent scholar and translator.

Table of Contents

Introduction  1
Part I. The Mandated Territory of Cameroon, 1939–1944
1. A Showcase for Colonial Humanism  17
2. An Archipelago of Camps  22
3. Madame Ateba  26
4. Advocating for a Regime of Exception  31
5. A French Dream  36
6. Haut-Nyong Must Be Saved  40
7. Lessons in Medical Administration  45
8. Paradise: A Guided Tour (December 2013)  52
9. A Real-Life Experiment  58
10. The Invisible Men  63
11. Social Medicine, French-Style  69
12. Life Has Returned  75
13. Colonel David Will Become a General  84
14. The Missionaries' Nightmare  92
15. The Dark Waters of the Haut-Nyong  95
16. Rubber for the Emperor  100
17. "Here We Are the Masters"  106
18. Koch! Koch!  111
Part II. The French Protectorate of Wallis and Futuna, 1933–1938
19. King David  125
20. Uvea, Desert Island  129
21. Chronicles of the Golden Age  140
22. I te Temi o Tavite (In the Time of David)  153
23. Doctor Machete  160
24. Becoming King, Part I: Coup d'état at the Dispensary  165
25. Becoming King, Part II: The Wallisian Art of Governing  172
26. Becoming King, Part III: Kicking Custom to the Curb  178
27. Te Hau Tavite  183
28. Tavite Lea Tahi (David-Only-Speaks-Once)  190
29. Doctor Disaster  198
Part III. Epilogues
30. Afelika (Africa)  215
31. Dachau, Indochina  223
32. The Light Riots  232
Afterword: Global Health Utopias from David to COVID-19  238
Acknowledgments  245
Notes  249
Index  293

What People are Saying About This

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance - Laurie Garrett

“Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Guillaume Lachenal’s The Doctor Who Would Be King tells a tale of good intentions run amok amid twentieth-century colonialism. Exhaustively researched, the story of ‘Dr. David’ and his dreams of an African health utopia, erected under French colonial rule, is both heartbreaking and fascinating.”

Editorial Reviews

In this riveting account, Guillaume Lachenal discovers that French doctors seeking police powers and administrative control in colonial Cameroon did not lead to a health utopia, nor did these arrangements reverse decades of demographic decline in the battered colony. What they got was their own transformation into colonial governors. A superb translation of a gifted scholar and stylist, The Doctor Who Would Be King is as alive as any ethnography to social life in poorly known but much roiled parts of the French empire that once circled the globe.

Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History - Paul Farmer

"An absorbing . . . account of a French colonial doctor who was handed absolute political control of an African territory the size of Switzerland in the years 1939-44. . . . It is impossible not to feel the presence of Joseph Conrad’s tale of lordly isolation and madness. It is as if, by assembling this story from archival fragments and the oral accounts of present-day residents, Mr. Lachenal is seeking to bring Dr. David back to our metropolitan gaze in much the way Conrad’s Marlow sought to bring Kurtz back from the jungle."

Wall Street Journal - Tunku Varadarajan

[Lachenal] leaves us at a crossroads, torn as we are today between the WHO’s proclamations about the advent of global health and the disenchantment caused by emerging microbes and the worsening of inequalities. Depending on whether one reads The Doctor Who Would Be King as a novel . . . or as an essay on contemporary biopolitics, the reader will come out of it reinvigorated or shaken, but not unscathed.

L’Histoire - Anne Marie Moulin

[Lachenal’s] investigation, in which dreams of grandeur, violence, and the tragedy of power are intertwined, is as fascinating as it is disturbing.

L’Obs - Laurent Lemire

"The Doctor Who Would Be King is a beautifully written, engrossing book that analyzes the career of a French colonial doctor in both Central Africa and Polynesia but also reflects on the thrills and pitfalls of historical research, the instability of historical narratives, and how traces of the past live on in the present. ... This superb book will be of interest to wide-ranging audiences, including historians of medicine, Africa, Polynesia, European empire, and beyond."

Isis - Sarah Runcie

[The Doctor Who Would Be King] is an expansive and masterful project whose major contributions are to the history of French colonialism and to historical research methodologies more broadly. . . . Readers . . . will enjoy the ride.

H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews - Caitlin Barker