French Medication in 19th and 20th Centuries China: Rejection or Compliance in Far South Treaty Ports, Concessions and Leased Territories

International audienceThis chapter examines interactions between the French physicians appointed in the last decade of the nineteenth century on Southern Chinese soil and various members of the local society. More precisely, it focuses on the ways Chinese people reacted towards French doctors’ prescriptions and thus addresses the issue of authority and power, at the core of the present volume. Indeed, as different scholars working on contemporary societies have pointed out, the attitudes of acceptance or rejection towards medications depend on a set of factors far more complex and diverse than the notion of efficiency only, a complex notion yet. The status of the physician in society and thus the legitimacy of his power, the less or more critical attitude of people towards those who claim having the power to transform the others, and the collective and individual conceptions of disease and health improvement are as much as elements that can explain the different regimes of compliance towards medications that one can observe in any society. None of the sources that are available to us can be compared to the modern ethnological or sociological inquiries that allowed recent scholarship on this issue in contemporary societies. Nevertheless, French archives together with Chinese gazetteers and local medical treatises offer valuable insights into this question raised in the context of nineteenth and twentieth centuries China, when the Qing empire came to be shared among different political entities that bestowed foreign physicians and native patients different but interrelated status