Ellen J. Amster, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956

Amster’s book is an original and well-documented social history of medicine in Morocco during the precolonial and colonial periods. While approaching embodiment as a historical and social process, a method inspired by Foucault’s biopolitics, the author simultaneously shows the limitation of the power/knowledge Foucauldian approach when applied to colonial medicine in Morocco. The author illustrates how the medical encounter, in this particular context, is less a hegemonic inscription of disci...