The medicalization of childbirth in colonial Vietnam (1880–1944)

This dissertation explores the interaction between Vietnamese childbirth traditions and French medicine from 1880 to 1944. As a history of both modern Vietnam and French colonial medicine, it traces the introduction of French obstetrical practices to Vietnam and explores the Vietnamese responses to the colonial regulations of childbirth and motherhood skills. By investigating a multitude of medical projects and campaigns, this dissertation reveals the French efforts to relocate Vietnamese childbirth to clinical settings and their attempts to modernize indigenous traditions of child care and mothercraft. In order to highlight the complex transnational sources of colonial policy, this dissertation adopts a comparative approach that elucidates the linkages between health care in Vietnam and various social and medical discourses in France and Europe on depopulation, infant mortality, social hygiene, and motherhood. At the same time, as a history of modern Vietnam, this dissertation underscores the role of underrepresented Vietnamese groups, such as midwives and women, in the dissemination and translation of the French model of childbirth and infant care. The existence of a plural system of childbirth services in the 1930s and 1940s in Vietnam represents the process of negotiations at the local level, during which both the French and Vietnamese regimes of childbirth underwent compromises and adaptations to co-exist in the new context