Guillaume Lachenal. The Doctor Who Would Be King (Theory in Forms). Translated by Cheryl Lynn Smeall. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. x + 298 pp. $104.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4780-1524-6; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-1786-8.
Reviewed by Caitlin Barker (Michigan State University)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (July, 2022)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Guillaume Lachenal is explicit from the outset that The Doctor who Would be King is a book about traces. The traces in question are those left behind by Dr. Jean Joseph David, a medical doctor and French Colonial Army officer who ruled over two different medical regimes of the French Empire: first in the 1930s as “King David” on the South Pacific island of Wallis, and later during World War II as “Emperor David” in Cameroon. By examining Dr. David’s traces Lachenal also investigates the relationship between utopia and failure, an interaction that he argues is a key current in the history of colonial medicine. While medicine is the subject of the book, this is an expansive and masterful project whose major contributions are to the history of French colonialism and to historical research methodologies more broadly.
Part 1, on the Haut-Nyong experiment, takes place during the Second World War in what is today the East Region of Cameroon. Through a mix of traditional historical narrative and vignettes from Lachenal’s fieldwork in Cameroon, he weaves together the story of how David came to be appointed ruler of this vast region, and of the project “Emperor David” spearheaded to study and reduce the burden of sleeping sickness via a medical regime. The inspiration and foundational research for this section comes from Wang Sonné, a renowned Cameroonian historian of medicine who died in the early 2000s, leaving behind a wealth of largely unpublished and unfinished research on the Haut-Nyong experiment. Not only does Lachenal draw on the content of Sonné’s findings for his historical narrative, but Sonné’s research process itself becomes one of the traces that Lachenal examines. There is relatively little engagement with the work of other Cameroonian historians, however, which would have strengthened this section. Lachenal observes that the Haut-Nyong experiment’s utter failure to control sleeping sickness was particularly painful to the colonial doctors because, having finally seized administrative power themselves in an effort to create utopia, they could no longer blame colonial administrators for medical failures.
Part 2 takes us backwards in time and across the world, to the French protectorate of Wallis and Futuna during the period 1933-38. Drawing on oral interviews and archival research in both the South Pacific and Europe, Lachenal delves into the story that Dr. David became King David in Wallis before he was Emperor David in Cameroon. Animated largely by the question “was Dr. David ever really king?” this section engages with the anthropological literature on power, governance, and medicine in Wallis in order to complicate simplistic understandings of “colonial domination.” Here we also witness that the Haut-Nyong experiment was not the first time David’s dreams of utopia ended in failure. In Wallis, a 1936 typhoid epidemic was exacerbated by his own policies, with the result that, just as in Cameroon, the health outcomes were worse after four years of medical administration. Lachenal uses the two cases to demonstrate that utopia and dystopia are intertwined in the history of colonial medicine, as “utopia does not fit well with reality” (p. 211). While Lachenal explicitly refuses to frame the book as a transregional history, a bit more engagement with Afro-Pacific colonial trajectories would have provided valuable context for David’s place in the French empire.
Part 3 is a series of epilogues that first wrap up David’s story, then bring us up to date with the postcolonial history of Cameroon’s East Region, and finally end with an afterward written in the COVID-19 era. On David, Lachenal concludes that “the real-life experiments of social medicine never work, and this is not news to anyone,” but he argues that failure itself can be a generative analytical entry point (p. 107). He then extends earlier discussions of power and impotence to the postcolonial Cameroonian context, analyzing their impact on his own research process and arguing that the form of the archive (in this case, a crucial archive reduced to ashes) also carries content. Finally, in the afterward on COVID-19 and virus-hunting in east Cameroon, Lachenal identifies in modern public health interventions some of the same uneasy coexistence between utopian aspirations and dystopian reality that was present in David’s doomed projects nearly a century ago.
One of the book’s most valuable contributions is that it demonstrates what can be gained from not attempting to neatly transfigure the messy research process into a tight chronological historical narrative. Through an unconventional structure that follows his own search for David’s traces, Lachenal begins with what is chronologically the middle and most well-known part of David’s story: the Haut-Nyong experiment. By then shifting back in time and across the world for the “dress rehearsal” that was the Wallis experiment, Lachenal deftly highlights what he calls the “incoherent” nature of colonial projects (p. 195). Moreover, transiting directly between the chronologically earliest section (part 2) and the latest section (part 3) highlights the continuity of central themes in the history of global public health: power and impotence, utopia and failure. Inspired by Jean-François Bayart’s “biography without a subject” and Nancy Rose Hunt’s work, the narrative returns often to the same basic aspects of David’s story, each time engaging with different traces—or new readings of the same traces—in a manner that closely mirrors the actual process of historical research. The result is a structure that successfully allows Lachenal to carry out his goal of using traces to investigate the “intertwining and mutually engendering relationship” between the past and the present (p. 157).
In what is a rare combination, these sophisticated theoretical contributions are presented in a highly accessible and engaging literary translation by Cheryl Smeall that makes the book hard to put down. Readers with research interests as diverse as the history of public health, colonialism and authority, Central Africa, and the South Pacific will all find something valuable in it, and will enjoy the ride.
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Citation:
Caitlin Barker. Review of Lachenal, Guillaume, The Doctor Who Would Be King (Theory in Forms).
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57822
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |