Murder in Marrakesh: Émile Mauchamp and the French Colonial Adventure

4. A Doctor in Marrakesh

4 A Doctor in Marrakesh The Practice of Medicine By December 1905, Mauchamp’s clinic was up and running, at least for the time being, in the disputed but now remodeled Dar Ould Bellah house. Mauchamp wrote enthusiastic letters to all and sundry , extolling the immediate success of his practice. To the Morocco Committee he reported that he had between thirty and forty patients at a time waiting for a consultation. For the moment these were predominantly Jews, but he expected this eventually to change. Several Muslim notables, including two sharifs, or descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, had already come to his practice with their wives in tow. Treating women was, for Mauchamp, a particular triumph , “especially here, where the Arabs and Jews are very fanatical in what concerns their women.” In terms of his staff, Mauchamp now had an Arab translator, Si Muhammad, sent to him by the legation in Tangier. He was “more clever and better understood” than the Jewish translator, whom Mauchamp reassigned to duty in the pharmacy. The clinic employed two domestics as well, one a Berber and the other a Tunisian named Hajj Umar, a “hard worker” who had seen military service with the French as a drummer and who, along with the translator, could double as a nurse.1 Writing to his father on December 29, Mauchamp confided that he was waiting impatiently for the Algeciras conference to end so that that the diplomats in Tangier would be free. Then he would request permission to expand and hire a pharmacist. He boasted of already having a reputation of sorts as a miracle worker, especially for afflictions of the eyes. His practice was growing, he wrote, especially A Doctor in Marrakesh 93 because of the notables who sought him out both as a doctor and as a friend. The qadi, or judge, of the madina sent him bananas from his own garden and received Mauchamp sumptuously at his home. There “some négresses saturated me with various perfumes from silver ewers, [and] some négres filled me with incense even under my clothes with pans of smoking wood from the mosque.” He looked forward to an “indigestible” dinner with the sons of Si Muhammad Sibai, an important adviser to the sultan. The qaid of the Doukkala tribe, who had a garden near Mauchamp’s residence, had invited him for dinner the following week. Meanwhile, half his patients, he reported to his father, both Jewish and Muslim, were now women .2 A legation report sent from Tangier to Paris put Mauchamp’s daily quota of patients at 150 and reported that the doctor already had plans for a hospital with eight to ten beds for native Moroccans .3 But if Mauchamp put on a good face for some, to others he complained vociferously. Early in January he wrote at length to the French consul in Essaouira, claiming that “Mister Holtzmann [sic], calling himself a German and a doctor,” had launched a deliberate campaign to sabotage his practice. As the teachers Falcon and Souessia and “many Arab personalities” could all attest, Holzmann had spread rumors about him even before he had set foot in Marrakesh. “I was, he claimed, not a doctor but a French officer come here in disguise to draw up maps, conduct espionage, and lay the groundwork for a future French invasion.” Mauchamp said he ignored the reports, confident that the success of his clinic would dispel the rumors. In this he was encouraged by the patronage of many notables. Not least, the successful surgery he performed on the wife of one of them, a merchant named Si Ahmad bin Sami, contributed to his growing reputation. Nevertheless, he complained that his Arab clients, especially among the notables, had recently dropped off; patients on whom he had only recently operated no longer wanted to see him. Mauchamp ’s translator made inquiries and reported that Holzmann allegedly was making statements linking Mauchamp to a “FrancoChristian Freemason conspiracy” designed to dispatch as many Muslims as possible. “Clever” physicians such as Mauchamp, Holzmann reportedly said, “care for the Arabs with a show of great kindness, heal them, whether by medicines or by operations of the maladies from which they suffer, draw to them the confidence of all and attract a great reputation, but at the same time, they make them take a 94 Life subtle poison that only works two, three...