Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

5. Harem Medicine and the Sleeping Child: Law, Traditional Pharmacology, and the Gender of Medical Authority

Chapter 5 harem medicine and the sleeping child: law, traditional pharmacology, and the gender of medical authority In 1921, the editors of the premier journal of French medicine in Morocco, Maroc médical, complained to their readers that the Muslim Moroccan matron undermined the French doctor: “[She is] known to be hostile to us and to put pressure on the patient to turn from our orders to her own remedies—leg of frog or earth from the cemetery.”1 To discover her secrets, the doctors commissioned the wife of a French colonial officer , Aline Reveillaud de Lens, to observe her Muslim female neighbors in the harems of Meknes and report on their medical practices. First appearing as a series of eleven articles in Maroc médical from 1922 to 1923, de Lens’s work was published collectively as Pratiques des harems marocains : Sorcellerie, médecine, beauté (1925): In a new pot, boil water, oil, bits of bird, carrot seed, lavender, cumin, Marrakesh poppy and a piece of chameleon. Filter with a wool rag. Have the child drink it until he vomits, then rub his body with the residue in the rag. The matron cauterizes his arm, his fist and his head with a piece of rue wood and covers him until he sweats. The next day, the mother urinates in her hand and spreads the liquid saying, “I reject sickness !” She also urinates into a glass and says, “I have found the remedy!” She adds cumin, leaves the urine overnight, and feeds it to the infant for three days.2 The Muslim woman worried French doctors, not only because of such iatrogenic practices, but also because she exercised superior authority to diagnose sickness, administer remedies, and select healers for the family. To gain access to secluded Muslim women and to enter this female medical world, protectorate doctors were obliged to engage French women to act as medical intermediaries. Mme. de Lens’s study reveals the gendered na- harem medicine and the sleeping child 143 ture of medical knowledge in Morocco and the place of women at the intersections of colonialism, medicine, law, and subjectivity. French doctors also criticized native women’s healing because they sought to inscribe the Muslim body into law. Modern governmentality builds its power on the body,3 and nineteenth-century France licensed one medicine in order to extend state power over individual bodies, homes, marriages, and intimate family life.4 As Jacques Donzelot has argued, metropolitan France made the “transition from a government of families to a government through the family” by training mothers as its “stateapproved nurses.”5 But such mechanisms were useless in protectorate Morocco , where the colonial state was officially forbidden from interfering in the Muslim family, traditional healing, or Islamic law. Worse, native women enjoyed superior medical authority in childbirth, family pharmacology , and médecine légale (legal expertise about states of pregnancy, injury , birth, and death), areas in which the French doctor claimed expertise . French doctors resented Muslim women, whom they saw as medical rivals, sorceresses, and the principal obstacles to opening Muslim homes to French civilization. Gender exposes the messiness of medicine as applied colonial practice; we do not find colonizer versus colonized, but French male doctors resenting their female colleagues, Muslim men fighting their wives in Islamic courts, and French women using Muslim gender seclusion to build colonial careers. Moroccan traditional medicine was itself gendered, for Muslim women mediated between several scientific systems: the Greco-Islamic tradition, “spiritual” saintly healing, and “Prophetic medicine,” the popular medical genre codified by Islamic jurists. The introduction of foreign colonial doctors brought French and Muslim gender systems into open conflict as French doctors sought to push Muslim women out of medicine and confine them to private homes ruled by patriarchal authority. Despite its claims to universality, French Pasteurian medicine was a field of gender struggle, with multiple nodes of power and authority. the qabla, the arifa, the adala: women’s medical authority in morocco Historically, women “knowers” (arifat) were official medical authorities in the sultans’ courts and administrations. The sultans appointed arifat to manage the female insane asylums and the women’s prisons (Dar al Arifat).6 In the royal harems, the court arifa delivered the sultan’s children and provided women of the harem with medical care.7 A sixteenth-century 144 medicine and the saints manuscript describes the duties of Bint Ibn Lajjo, arifa to the ladies of the...