Désigner la folie, manquer le « fou »

Abstract

In 1936, a paper written by Doctor Huot, a French physician, head of Anjanamasina lunatic asylum, questioned the vacuity of the nosographies found in the patients’ records. According to him, the medical inquiries undertaken in the asylum provided very little information about any precise delineation of insanity on Madagascar Island. At the heart of the problem, he spotted the role played by the Malagasy junior physician, also called “resident physician”, probably the only one that could really grasp insanity in Anjanamasina. Far from being a sheer admission of helplessness, Huot’s paper, as it is here cross-checked with administrative archives and the records of the institutionalized patients, allows to disclose the whole of an informal hierarchy revolving around such “ignorance”. Whereas the French authorities seemed to be unable to understand what is really at stake in Madagascar mental diseases, a range of “delegating bio-policies”, with the resident physician playing a key role in them, is eventually brought into light.

Keywords

• Madagascar
• psychiatry
• medical inquiries
• bio-policies
• nosographies
• insanity