Le Dr Nguyễn Văn Luyện et ses confrères

• Main Author: Laurence Monnais
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2010-10-01
• Series: Moussons
• Subjects: colonialism; medicalization; private medicine; colonized doctors; Nguyễn Văn Luyện; Vietnam
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/moussons/281

This paper constitutes the first account on the history of Vietnamese private medical practice during the French domination over Indochina. It aims to revisit multiple historiographies and at the same time to suggest new ways of writing the history of colonial health and health care. First, I analyse the legal and political context in which Vietnamese private doctors could emerge as a professional and as a social group. Then I insist on the main characteristics of this medical community in terms of training, professional life and scientific and social activities. These Vietnamese doctors would appear as active agents and inventive experts who were to participate actively to the improvement of indigenous health. In order to better understand the activities of the group and their outcomes the paper will focus on one practitioner in particular, Dr. Nguyễn Văn Luyện (1898-1946). Luyện’s biography helps to reveal Vietnamese doctors’ polyvalence, expertise and dynamism both in terms of public health involvement and individual care ; in doing so one may be able to demonstrate that this new community of experts got in tune with the Vietnamese urban society it was supposed to care for, a society experiencing growing political, economic and social change at the time, especially during the interwar period.