Imperial Medicine and Proselytization in Robert Kerr’s “Salvific” Activities In Morocco, 1886–1915

Abstract

This essay reveals the intersection of medicine and proselytization as “salvific” activities and “tools of empire” in the missionary account of the Scottish physician, missionary, judge, and emissary of the Jewish Committee of the English Presbyterian Church, Robert Kerr. In the latter’s account, Pioneering in Morocco: A Record of Seven Years’ Medical Mission Work in the Palace and the Hut (1894), Kerr positions himself as a philanthropist who saves Moroccans from diseases and barbarity through medicine and the Gospel – two efficient colonial instruments. Kerr treated a significant number of patients, particularly in the region of Rabat and Salé, diagnosing their illnesses and checking their bodies for the sources of their ailments. As a practice, this colonial medicine is a form of epistemological colonization of the body, through the assertion of “western” medicine’s superiority over indigenous healing. By checking Moroccan bodies, a peculiar, colonial vision, which is hinged on hegemonic surveillance, is transposed onto them. Kerr’s emphasis on knowledge as the sole key to improvement and transformation as well as on his colonially informed ideas posit a shift from primitivism, decadence, and superstition to modernity, progress, and rationality through his western medical practice. The essay therefore tackles the relational thread and interplay between medicine, religion, and imperialism in precolonial Morocco.

Keywords:

• Colonialism
• Kerr, Robert
• medicine
• Morocco
• proselytism
• representation

Acknowledgements

This essay has benefited a lot from the rigirous reviewing process of the anonymous reviewers of Interventions. I appreciate their inspiring and insightful comments. I would like also to thank very much the editor of the Journal for his meticulous remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Missionaries saw leprosy in strongly biblical terms as a malady of the cursed, with its disfigured and crippled sufferers living in squalor and rags, crying out for Christ’s healing touch (Vaughan 1991, 79).

2 Etymologically, the word sharif means noble. A person is appointed a sharif when his family descends directly from the Prophet Mohammed through his daughter Fatima Zahra. This descendancy and baraka (divine blessing) enabled him to gain political and social positions and afforded his family respect from the whole society.