Dear Hmadness readers,
Two articles have been published in the journal Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte. The first is titled “Exotic Syphilis. How Medicine Turned Syphilis into a ‘Benign’ Dermatological Disease during Colonization (France, 1900–1940)“ and is written by Guillaume Linte.
The second, “‘Mahomet Implanted a Real Neuropathic State in the Brains of Believers’: North African Masculinities and Colonial Psychiatry in the Writings of Maurice Boigey“, is by Nina Studer.
The abstracts of these articles are presented below.

Syphilis exotique. Comment la médecine a fait de la syphilis une maladie dermatologique «bénigne» durant la colonisation (France, 1900–1940), by Guillaume Linte.

“During the first half of the 20th century, syphilis was a major public health issue in France and its colonial empire. However, the disease was not seen in the same light in the colonies,or, more specifically, among the colonised population. In the 1900s, a form of thedisease that was supposed to be specific to them was defined: «exotic syphilis». This wassaid to differ from the disease known in Europe due to different modes of contaminationand symptoms. Regarded as extremely serious in France, syphilis was considered to be arelatively benign dermatological condition in its exotic form. This article analyses the evolution of medical conceptions of this disease between 1900 and the Second World War, and demonstrates how these ideas contributed to minimising the health problem it represented in the colonies”.

«Mahomet Implanted a Real Neuropathic State in the Brains of Believers»: North African Masculinities and Colonial Psychiatry in the Writings of Maurice Boigey, by Nina Studer.

“In 1908, Maurice Boigey, who worked at the time as a military doctor in the so-called Campagne du Maroc, i. e. the French military conquest of Morocco between 1907 and 1912, wrote an article with the title Psychological Study on Islam, plagiarised from an 1897 book by a known antisemite and Islamophobe. In it, Boigey framed Islam as a cause of mental disorders: «The first disciples of the prophet were degenerates and their doctrines, put into practice, caused real mental lesions in those who followed them. In other words,Mahomet implanted a real neuropathic state in the brains of believers». Boigey’s deeply pejorative article was published in the Annales Médico-Psychologiques, the main francophone journal for studies of psychiatry, which lent respectability to his claims. While Boigey’s study should be understood as the most extreme point of view amongst French authors writing about the psychology of Islam, most of his contemporaries agreed that therewere causal links between the religion of the colonised in the Maghreb and the development of mental disorders amongst them. This article specifically analyses the North African masculinities constructed by Boigey, how his theories fit into wider medical and psychiatric frameworks prevalent at the time, and how they influenced later texts and knowledge production about North African men”.