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French Educated Vietnamese Doctors and Medicine in the Vietnamese Public Sphere under Colonial Rule Haydon L. Cherry, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Yale University This
short paper is a rough first attempt to show the ways in which French
medical thought and practices changed the ways in which the Vietnamese
conceived of and practiced medicine during the late 1920s and early 1930s.
It takes as its starting point the development of a small but important
Vietnamese bourgeoisie under French colonial rule in the first decades
of the twentieth century. Among the members of that bourgeoisie were a
number of French educated Vietnamese doctors who studied medicine either
in France or at the colonial university in Hà N?i. The first part
of this paper outlines the education of those doctors, and based on their
memoirs and other documents, describes some of their experiences during
the colonial period. At the same time that those doctors were educated
and began to practice, a public sphere based on the circulation of printed
text was forming. The second part of this essay briefly discusses that
public sphere and focuses on one one prominent periodical, Ph? N? Tân
V?n [Women's News], that circulated at the time and in which medicines
and medical services were advertised and Western understandings of health
care and medicine were publicised and contested. In colonial Vi?t Nam,
as Roger Chartier has written of elsewhere, "the increased circulation
of the printed word transformed forms of sociability, allowed new ways
of thinking, and changed the relations of power." |