This dissertation details the introduction of the French colonial medical system in Cambodia. French colonial involvement in Cambodia dates from 1862 to 1953; however, because this study is most interested in the relationship between the medical establishment and the Cambodian population, it focuses largely on the period of 1907 to 1940, when the medical services were most active in expanding to the indigenous population. The increasing reach of western medical services in the early twentieth century, as well as the expansion of the colonial state more generally, laid the groundwork for profound changes in Cambodian society. However, colonial medical services were not entering a health care vacuum. Indigenous Khmer, Cham, Vietnamese, and other ethnicities that made up the population of Cambodia observed a wide variety of medical practices in the precolonial period. Healing and medical care, as cultural practices, are based on specific epistemological systems and social contexts. As the French health services encroached beyond colonial enclaves, the technologies they employed along with their cultural associations had to negotiate with existing cultural practices. This dissertation relates both descriptively and theoretically the wider social framework of changing medical ideologies and practice in colonial Cambodia. It argues that both European and indigenous practices were transformed in unexpected ways during this period of interaction. However, the two systems of health neither effectively hybridized nor displaced one another; rather, they developed in parallel.
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