Journal of - International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine

The Tangiers School of Medicine and its Physicians: A Forgotten
Initiative of Medical Education Reform in Morocco (1886-1904)(x)
Francisco Javier MARTÍNEZ-ANTONIO
to Morocco. They included the Provincial Hospital, the
Military Hospital, the Spanish Society of Hygiene and the
Ateneo of Madrid. The students took some exams at Madrid’s
Faculty of Medicine, which they passed “with the best
results”, and showed their skill to physicians of the Military
Hospital, as seen in the interview to Óvilo we mentioned
before 41 . They were even given a reception by Spain’s Regent
Queen, María Cristina of Habsburg, at the Royal Palace 42 .
This was not their first royal audience, at least for Zaudi,
who had met Hassan I in 1887, during a Spanish embassy to
Rabat, and in 1889, during the visit of the sultan to Tangiers,
on both occasions in the company of Óvilo 43 .
As we said before, it was from 1890 onwards that these
three students probably started working as doctors. That
year, Romani was supposedly allowed to work on a ship
of Moroccan pilgrims travelling to Mecca, on a trip organised
by a member of Tangiers’ upper class 44 . In 1892, the
three doctors were involved in their first military medical
work outside Tangiers. A harsh conflict had arisen at that
time between Andjera tribesmen and the Moroccan regular
army, which caused a substantial number of casualties
among both parties. The Spanish dispensary provided
medical care to everyone diseased or injured while Óvilo
and his disciples also travelled to the regular army main
camp to assess its sanitary condition and assist those who
needed it 45 . The following year, two of the three Moroccan
physicians probably joined doctor Severo Cenarro in a hurried
trip to the Mogador Island lazaretto (in front of the city
of Mogador, nowadays Essauira), where he had to supervise
the organisation of a quarantine for several thousand
pilgrims returning from Mecca that were suspected of being
affected by cholera 46 . The Sanitary Council of Tangiers
(in operation since 1840 and similar to those of Istanbul,
Alexandria or Tunis) had ordered the pilgrims to be sent
there with two Spanish civil doctors, Gustavo Prieto and
Sotero García de Mayoral. But following the news of a small
cholera outbreak, the Council decided to send its medico de
sanidad or medico consultor (medical consultant) himself,
doctor Cenarro, in order to avoid the spread of the epidemic
throughout the country, as what happened for the last
time in 1878 (Óvilo had been the medical consultant at that
moment but his suggestions had been rejected) 47 .
We do not know for certain, even if we consider it highly
possible, that the three Moroccan physicians helped in the
assistance of choleric patients and in the display of sanitary
measures against the cholera epidemic that affected Tangiers
in 1895. Dr. Cenarro, as head of the Tangiers Hygiene
Commission (founded in 1888) and medical consultant of
the Sanitary Council, as well as Dr. Óvilo, in that occasion
acting as commissioner appointed by the Spanish govern-
ISHIM 2011-2012
ment to study the epidemic, led the fight against cholera in
the city and it would have been normal that the Moroccan
physicians took part in it in one way or another 48 . After that
date, we have found only scarce data about Zaudi, Dukkali
and Romani, who were never mentioned by their names
(actually, they could have been other late students of Óvilo).
In 1899, the French doctor based in Algeria Louis Raynaud,
in a mission of the Sanitary Council of Tangiers to assess
the condition of the Mogador Island lazaretto, found in that
city one of the Moroccan physicians whom he could never
assess his medical knowledge as he was always “drunk with
wine and absinthe and intoxicated with kif (hashish)” 49 . On
the contrary, Raynaud had heard of three “very reliable” of
his colleagues who worked as military doctors in “Tangiers
or Marrakech” where they “practised their science with
proficiency” 50 . In 1902, in a guide of Tangiers, reference was
made within the city’s medical corps to “three Arab physicians,
old students of doctor Óvilo” 51 .
CONCLUSION
The growing weakness of the Moroccan government,
the disorientation of Spanish initiatives in Morocco after
the loss of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, the French
ascendant on Morocco after the Algeciras Conference
of 1906 and the uncertainty surrounding the destiny of
Tangiers after the establishment of the French and Spanish
Protectorates in Morocco in 1912, all these circumstances
contributed to make the future uncertain for the first Moroccan
modern physicians trained at the Tangiers School
of Medicine. As an example, the Spanish physicians who
followed Óvilo in the Tangiers Legation forgot about the
School and seemed not to count on the existing Moroccan
physicians for any help in the competition to colonise the
country 52 . On the other hand, the French authorities issued
a dahir (decree) on the 12 th April 1916 which actually limited
the exercise of modern medicine in French Morocco
to French doctors or to those trained in European universities,
while accepting the right of “natives” to practise “Arabic
medicine, save for vaccine procedures” 53 . Following this
dahir, the Direction Générale du Service de Santé du Maroc
(French Morocco’s Central Board of Health Services) affirmed
in 1919 that a diploma of the Tangiers School had
nothing but “the value of a certificate issued to a nurse” 54 .
It is not unusual then that most of the first six modern
Moroccan physicians trained at the Tangiers School did not
continue practising medicine. The exception was probably
the least expected, Hamed ibn al-Hasmi, whom we have
found as a local informant of the Spanish army pharmacist
Joaquín Mas-Guindal in the Atlantic town of Larache
83