Treasures of the Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University: A French Doctor in Siam

The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in ASEAN studies, Thailand, literature, history, political science, ethnography, linguistics, anthropology, and related subjects.

Among them is Siam Doctor, a memoir by Dr. Jacques Meyer May, who served for eight years in Bangkok and Hanoi as chief surgeon of a hospital in Bangkok, physician to the Royal Palace in Siam, and professor of surgery at the Medical College of Hanoi.

The TU Library circulating collection also includes several other books about healthcare in Thailand.

Two researchers have noted in a biographical article:

May was a French surgeon, born in Paris in 1896, who gained his medical degree from the faculty of medicine of the Universite´ de Paris in 1925. It was his surgical expertise that led him to accept the position of Chief Surgeon at the French Mission Hospital in Bangkok in 1932.

This was a post he was to hold until 1935 after which he was appointed to the position of Professor of Clinical Surgery in the newly created Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hanoi.

In 1940, after the Japanese invasion of Indochina and the arrival of the Vichy regime in France, May enlisted in the pro-Gaullist Free French Forces and participated in the war effort.

This first phase of May’s career was to end in the French Antilles; here, he briefly took up the post of Chief Surgeon in the Guadeloupe Hospital before his emigration to the United States, in 1947, where he obtained his license to practice medicine in the State of New York and embarked on the second phase of his career.

Dr. May’s book describes his experiences at a French mission hospital in Bangkok (1932–1936) and then at the Hanoi University Medical School in Indochina (1936–1940).

Researchers have detected a colonialist and triumphalist rhetoric in it.

Triumphalism is defined as an attitude or feeling of victory or superiority, such as the attitude that one religious belief is superior to all others.

May’s autobiography states that his medical career was a celebration of the victories of civilization over barbarism.

His mission in Siam was to preach Western medicine to the Far East.

He may not have been aware that by the 1930s, there was already an extensive history of Western medicine in Siam.

As all students know, HRH Prince Mahidol of Songkla (1892-1929) was a medical doctor who played a key role in establishing modern medicine and public health in Thailand.

He studied public health at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and medicine at Harvard University.

He improved the curriculum at Siriraj Hospital, sent Thai doctors overseas to study, and negotiated with the Rockefeller Foundation for financial and professional support.

HRH Prince Mahidol is known as the father of modern medicine and public health of Thailand.

For Dr. May, European medicine was seen as promoting a powerful message of authority and progress.

This participated in the story of European global presence and authority.

Dr. May’s European, and specifically French, imperial ambition is expressed in his book.

When he arrived in 1930s Bangkok, he noted that Siam seemed like a dreamy kingdom awaiting the arrival of Japanese imperial aspiration:

Siam was not yet Thailand, and no imperialistic threat was implied in the country’s name. […] This was Bangkok, as the sleepy monarchy was about to fall, dictators about to rise, as princesses were enjoying in their palaces their last weeks of omnipotence, the people in the streets their last years of peace.

By contrast, Dr. May’s description of his arrival in Hanoi in 1936, differed from his recollections of Bangkok:

Hanoi, the imperial city, struck me as an average-sized French university town. Large avenues, cleanly lined with shadowy trees, small villas, or big buildings, were bathed in deep unexpected silence [due to] the heat, the cushiony macadam of the streets, and the spontaneous segregation of native and European quarters.

Dr. May saw Siam as benefiting from imperial activity, for example in the railway running between Singapore and Bangkok, which was built with British, Danish and German capital and street lighting was introduced to Bangkok thanks to the efforts of two generations of Danes, Belgians and Frenchmen.

Dr. May also refers to the Western residential suburb and the procession of trams, and to the presence of European pharmacies and European doctors like himself.

He saw hospital care as divided economically, according to the fees that patients were able to pay.

Europeans were typically treated in private rooms with waxed floors and an abundance of white lace and linen in an exclusive ward of the Saint Louis Hospital.

Saint Louis Hospital is a large private Catholic hospital in Sathon District, Bangkok.

The hospital was founded in 1898 by Bishop Jean-Louis Vey, a French Catholic missionary, priest and bishop who served as Vicar Apostolic of Eastern Siam.

Saint Louis Hospital was the first Catholic hospital in Thailand.

Its Latin motto is Ubi Caritas, Ibi Deus Est. (God resides in mercy.)

Saint Louis Hospital had two further wards, one of which accommodated Thai patients who were separated from yet another ward of Thai patients who were more impoverished and unable to pay as much for medical treatments.

Dr. May stated:

Siam, just emerging from the dark ages with the help of scores of European and American advisers, had, in 1932, a medical picture which was not too bright. The rank and file of the people were taken care of by persons who were listed as healers.

Of these healers, some used their knowledge of local herbs to treat patients.

Dr. May found these practitioners to be arrogant, conceited, jealous and as secretly obnoxious as the venom they used in their preparations.

There were also massage therapists who lacked knowledge of Western medicine and potentially harmed patients.

Worse were witches who sold dangerous love charms and toxic drugs.

Dr. May declared:

I can’t be expected to act like a Siamese healer since I am a European doctor […] No modern state can be built in any tropical country, no democracy can be installed, until the people are restored to a minimum of power and health. [In  Siam,] the problems of preventive medicine and education exceed every other. It is painful to speak of freedom and self-government when the intelligence and judgement of 99% of the population are obscured by chronic anaemia and disease.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)