Social Determinants

When psychiatrist Frantz Fanon reflected on the role of doctors during the Algerian struggle for liberation in his 1959 essay “Medicine and Colonialism,” he emphasized the consequences of physicians’ class interests. More bluntly put, he tore into the colonizing complicities of his ostensibly humanistic profession. Although the physician presents himself as “the doctor who heals the wounds of humanity,” Fanon writes, he is in reality “an integral part of colonization, of domination, of exploitation.” Both the European colonial physician and the native Algerian physician are “economically interested in the maintenance of colonial oppression,” which yields them profit and elevated status. One of the chief services doctors provide to the perpetuation of oppressive systems, Fanon notes, is the use of scientific objectivity to obscure the role of politics in driving the sickness and death they dutifully treat and then bury in medical statistics.