Le Médecin du Prince: Voyage à Travers les Cultures (review)

Anne-Marie Moulin is without a doubt one of the best-known historians of science in France. Her work stands out for its richness and originality, especially since she never loses sight of the daily reality of the doctor, the disease, or the patient. In this work, she introduces us to hundreds of doctors who practiced outside their countries of origin from the time of the Pharaohs. These doctors practiced their métier—with or without diploma—and perfected their science, diversifying their sources of therapeutic knowledge, in the service of powerful people. Moulin guides readers toward a keen understanding of the complex therapeutic relationship across the ages, where communication, rumors, secrets, and power relations intersect. The volume thus takes up the unexplored theme of medical nomadism and at the same time sends us on a voyage across cultures, a voyage overflowing with shimmering anecdotes and primary sources masterfully rendered.

The decision to choose a foreign doctor is grounded in political and strategic considerations; the goal is the stability of the state. Consequently, the Ottoman Empire built a cosmopolitan body of medical practitioners (pp. 88–93). Mao’s doctor was ethnically Chinese, but came from the Chinese diaspora; was trained in Australia; and had no support networks in China (yet could still provide the Great Helmsman with excellent up-to-date biomedical care: p. 106). Despite his long-time position at the intersection of power and knowledge, the “king’s doctor” did not always limit his practice to the health—and sometimes the life—of his powerful patron. Beginning especially in the nineteenth century, these doctors used their positions of privilege to encourage the professionalization of medicine, the medicalization of societies, the popularization of techniques, and even the construction of modern nation–states as illustrated by the oft-cited case of Clot-Bey in Egypt. Enlarging the field of medical diplomacy, Moulin reminds us that a certain number of these doctors helped to negotiate the transition from a world in which high-quality medical care was a royal prerogative to one where it is a state duty.

In chapters 5 through 8, Moulin focuses on this last aspect, hammering home the message that medicine must be animated by the desire to do good, a desire that must transcend institutional rules and national borders. This focus leads Moulin to point out certain problems with the modern politics of health in a way that recalls stories of exclusion like that of Bechir Dinguizli, the first Tunisian medical doctor who, when marginalized by French colonial doctors in his home country, decided to preach the gospel of French medicalization in neighboring Morocco, or like those of underpaid foreign doctors practicing in France today (pp. 130–37). The “king’s doctor” has become a civil servant, perhaps even a government minister who designs systems while too often forgetting the common good, the needs of the patient (“evidence-based medicine” is roundly denounced: p. 247), or medical ethics, without knowing how to understand the “patient–king” or the rising popularity of alternative medicine in an age where health systems are “over-medicalized,” over-technologized, and increasingly bankrupt.

As Moulin admits in her preface, this book is the fruit of a personal, intimate reflection. Consequently, it is difficult to categorize. It is neither a popular study, nor a work of medical history as we generally use the term. It is packed full of literary, cinematographic, and theological references, as well as personal experiences. One might think of it as a biography, but that of Moulin herself, the ultimate foreign doctor. However one may choose to read it, Moulin, like Natalie Davis in her Trickster Travels,¹ offers up a compelling narrative on the so-called “clash of civilizations,” revealing a range of spaces of communication and mediation and forms of medical cosmopolitanism, and disturbing the scientific relationship between “center” and “peripheries.” She shows us that medical expertise, regardless of the medical system to which it is...