Lipiodol and Fertility Medicine in Interwar Colonial Algeria

Andersen, Margaret Cook

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-26024-7_5

Margaret Cook Andersen⁵

Part of the book series: New Directions in Welfare History ((NDWH))

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Abstract

This chapter considers how medical treatment of infertility in North Africa functioned and formed part of France’s civilizing mission. Beginning with Dr. Amedée Laffont in 1925, physicians treating sterility cases (both European and colonized Algerian) situated their work within France’s civilizing mission in the colony. Laffont saw fertility medicine as both a crucial service to the local population and a way of displaying the benefits of French colonial rule. He explained that by helping colonized Algerian women begin families, often following years of involuntary childlessness, physicians would build confidence in French medicine and display the beneficial influence of the colonial regime. One important development in interwar medicine was diagnosing, and sometimes curing, cases of tubal sterility with hysterosalpingography (or HSG) using a radio-opaque agent called Lipiodol. Like the other symbols of France’s civilizing influences, such as vaccines and railroads, Laffont and his colleagues positioned Lipiodol as a scientific achievement that could improve life in the colony.

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Notes

1.
Margaret Cook Andersen, Regeneration Through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
2.
On French pronatalism during the Third Republic more generally see, for example, Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origin of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Virginie De Luca Barrusse, Les Familles Nombreuses: Une Question Démographique, Un Enjeu Politique. France (1880–1940) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).
3.
See Kamel Kateb on demographic studies in the interwar period: Kamel Kateb, Européens, ‘indigènes’ et juifs en Algérie (1830–1962): Représentations et réalities des populations (Paris: INED, 2001). Margaret Andersen on pronatalist policies in interwar Algeria: Andersen, Regeneration Through Empire.
4.
On colonial medicine in Algeria, see for example, Hannah-Louise Clark, “Administering Vaccination in Interwar Algeria: Medical Auxiliaries, Smallpox, and the Colonial State in the Communes Mixtes,” French Politics, Culture and Society 34, no. 2 (2016): 32–56; Claire Fredj, “Encadrer la naissance dans l'Algérie coloniale. Personnels de santé et assistance à la mère et à l'enfant ‘indigènes’ (XIX^e-début du XX^e siècle),” Annales de démographie historique 122, no. 2 (2011): 169–203; William Gallois, The Administration of Sickness: Medicine and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Algeria (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
5.
For fertility medicine in France see Fabrice Cahen, “Obstacles to the Establishment of a Policy to Combat Infertility in France, c. 1920–1950” in G. Davis and T. Loughran eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Naomi Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe: A Political History of Reproductive Medicine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
6.
Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
7.
This story appeared as part of a series in the L’Echo d’Alger, beginning on April 16, 1936 under the title “Ville de Mustapha.” The articles featured history about the hospital in this quarter of Algiers and the services it offers in the present day. The two articles within this series that dealt with Massaouda’s story under the subheading of “Massouada veut un enfant” ran on 4/18/1936 (page 2) and 4/19/1936 (page 2).
8.
Janon, “Massouada veut un enfant,” L’Echo d’Alger (4/19/1936), 2.
9.
For a discussion of Devraigne, see for example, Margaret Cook Andersen, “‘Denied the Joys of Motherhood’: Infertility and Medicine in French Interwar Advice Columns,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, forthcoming.
10.
Pfeffer, 62.
11.
Most doctors in this period were reluctant to recommend surgery due to its associated risks and disappointing success rate. See Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe, 66.
12.
Guy Pallardy, “Marcel Guerbet, homme de contraste: Pharmacien des hôpitaux, Toxicologue et Industriel” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie no. 306 (1995): 72–82.
13.
For biographical information on Laffont see Livre Jubilaire offert au Professeur Amédée Laffont: Doyen honoraire de la faculté de médecine d’Alger professeur de clinique obstétricale et gynécologique membre correspondant de l’académie nationale de médecine (Paris: Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale), 1952.
14.
Amédée Laffont, “Une Belle œuvre: Un Hôpital franco-musulman à Paris,” Le Progrès de Guelma 44, no. 49 (6 December 1926), 1.
15.
Laffont see Livre Jubilaire offert au Professeur Amédée Laffont.
16.
Archives de la Bibliothèque nationale universitaire de Strasbourg (hereafter ABNUS): Fonds Marc Klein, MS 6.518:October 7, 1946 meeting of the comité consultatif de lutte contre la stérilité involontaire, 3–4.
17.
A. Laffont and F. Ferrari, “Note sur les cas de stérilité observés à la consultation gynécologique de la maternité d’Alger,” L’Algérie médicale (January–December, 1928), 357–60.
18.
A. Laffont, “Les femmes indigènes aux consultations prénatales et gynécologiques à Alger et en Algérie,” L’Algérie médicale (January–December, 1934), 34.
19.
Claire Fredj, “Encadrer la naissance dans l'Algérie coloniale. Personnels de santé et assistance à la mère et à l'enfant ‘indigènes’ (XIX^e-début du XX^e siècle)” Annales de démographie historique 122, no. 2 (2011): 169–203.
20.
Solange Perrin, “De la Stérilité à la Maternité d’Alger: Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine,” Université d’Alger (Alger: Imprimerie F. Michaud, 1938), 60–61.
21.
Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 163.
22.
Perrin, “De la Stérilité à la Maternité d’Alger,” 80.
23.
Robert Vincent, “la stérilité en Afrique du Nord: coutumes et superstitions, causes, traitement” thèse pour le doctorat en médecine, Université d’Alger, 1935.
24.
A. Laffont, “L’examen des couples stériles à la maternité d’Alger,” L’Algérie médicale (January–December 1935), 219–23.
25.
For example see Nina Salouâ Studer, The Hidden Patients : North African Women in French Colonial Psychiatry Vol. 8. (Köln: Böhlau, 2015).
26.
Ibid, 220.
27.
Laffont and Ferrari, “Note sur les cas de stérilité observés à la consultation gynécologique de la maternité d’Alger.”
28.
See Andersen, “‘Denied the Joys of Motherhood’”.
29.
Laffont, “L’examen des couples stériles à la maternité d’Alger,” 220.
30.
Archives Nationales (AN): 19,760,173/27: Bureau de la famille (direction de l’action sociale): file on Stérilité: L. Devraigne, “Traitement de la Stérilité Conjugale,” Paris Médical No. 47 (19 November 1938), 369.
31.
Simon Szreter, “Introduction,” in The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History, ed. Simon Szreter (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2019).
32.
Fabrice Cahen and Adrien Minard, “Fecundity in a World of Scourges: Venereal Diseases, Criminal Abortion, and Acquired Infertility in France, circa 1880–1950,” in The Hidden Affliction: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Infertility in History, ed. Simon Szreter (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2019).
33.
Simon Szreter, “Introduction,”
34.
Ibid.
35.
Liat Kozma, “Between Colonial, National, and International Medicine: The Case of Bejel,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 744–71.
36.
For example, Perrin, “De la Stérilité à la Maternité d’Alger, 22.
37.
The concept of hereditary syphilis was a major preoccupation in medical and hygienist circles in the early twentieth century. The theory held that an embryo could inherit syphilis at the moment of conception and pass this inherited trait on down the generations. In theory a perfectly healthy woman could give birth to a child stricken with this inherited trait. While this theory is no longer accepted, it was an alarming concept during a period marked by concerns about degeneration and population quality. On concerns about degeneration and population quality see William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
38.
Laffont and Ferrari, “Note sur les cas de stérilité observés à la consultation gynécologique de la maternité d’Alger.”
39.
Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (Hereafter CAOM): BIB AOM 40598: Abel Olivier, Les trompes utérines et la stérilité: Etude sur la perméabilité tubaire (Alger: Imprimerie Nord-Africaine, 1932), 49.
40.
Ibid, 113–14.
41.
Perrin, “De la Stérilité à la Maternité d’Alger,” 30.
42.
Archives du Féminisme (hereafter AF): Fonds Brunschvicg: 1AF632: natalité et depopulation: Sarah Broido, “Dénatalité Dépopulation: leurs causes les remèdes” (1939). UFSF stands for Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes.
43.
Eugénie Delanoë, Trente années d’activité médicale et sociale au Maroc (Paris: Librarie Maloine, 1949).
44.
Mme. E. Delanoë, “La Stérilité dans le milieu indigène au Maroc. Traitement médical,” 5ème Congrès français de gynécologie, Paris 18–21 mai 1936, 794.
45.
Ibid, 795.
46.
Laffont, “L’examen des couples stériles à la maternité d’Alger.”
47.
AN: 19760173/27: Bureau de la famille (direction de l’action sociale): file on Stérilité: Dr. Fulconis, “La Consultation de la stérilité à la maternité d’Alger,” L’Algérie Médicale (July 1939).
48.
See Fabrice Cahen, “Obstacles to the Establishment of a Policy to Combat Infertility in France, c. 1920-1950,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility, eds. G. Davis and T. Loughran (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Andersen, “‘Denied the Joys of Motherhood’”.
49.
See Kateb, Européens, ‘indigènes’ et juifs en Algérie (1830–1962) and Margaret Andersen, “Race, Migration, and Fears of Communism in 1948 Morocco.” Journal of contemporary history 55.1 (2020): 145–160.
50.
Fulconis, “La Consultation de la stérilité à la maternité d’Alger,” 343.
51.
Ibid, 346.
52.
CAOM: BIB AOM 40598: Olivier, Les trompes utérines et la stérilité: Etude sur la perméabilité tubaire, 5.
53.
Ibid, 5–6.
54.
AN: 19760173/27: Fulconis, “La Consultation de la stérilité à la maternité d’Alger,” 346.

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Department of History, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA
Margaret Cook Andersen

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Department of History, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA
Margaret Cook Andersen
Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA
Melissa K. Byrnes

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Andersen, M.C. (2023). Lipiodol and Fertility Medicine in Interwar Colonial Algeria. In: Andersen, M.C., Byrnes, M.K. (eds) Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire. New Directions in Welfare History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26024-7_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26024-7_5
Published: 29 November 2023
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-031-26024-7
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