j.c. baurac, cholera, and 1890's cochinchina
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:52:06 -0800
From: "David A Biggs" <david.biggs@ucr.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] j.c. baurac, cholera, and 1890's cochinchina
dear list-
i'm wondering if anyone knows of recent literature or manuscripts related
to the work of j.c. baurac, a doctor in the colonial medical service who
floated around cochinchina's waterways from 1886 to about 1899 inoculating
over 300,000 people against cholera.
most of you may know him for the 3 volume work "Cochinchine et Ses
Inhabitants" (1894,1899) published with over two hundred of his photographs
that he took during his trips aboard a little steam-boat (the "Vaico ") to
every arrondissement in the colony for those years.
he's a fascinating, complex colonial character--somewhat larger than
life--not only for his photographs but also the ways he mixed Pasteurian
medicine with the business of colonial governance. as word traveled about
the effectiveness of his cholera vaccinations, he was surprised to find
that a village producing just 300 children at his boat on the first visit
produced 800 or 900 six months later. after ten years traveling around
cochinchina, he proposed that based on his records of inoculees, the total
population in the colony should be revised upward from 1.8 million to 4 or
5 million...then he drew the obvious connection at the time that much
greater revenues might be derived from the doubling of head taxes that
would result.
Does anyone know of people who have written about Baurac, or if/where his
papers might be held?
Happy TG,
Subject: RE: [Vsg] j.c. baurac, cholera, and 1890's cochinchina
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2006 14:48:20 +1100
From: "Thanh Nguyen" <Thanh.Nguyen@anu.edu.au>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi David,
I found this book
Author: Baurac, J. C
Title: La Cochinchine et ses habitants. 3.ptie. Provinces de l'Est / J.C. Baurac
Published Saigon : Imprimerie Rey, 1899
in the ANU library, Australian.
Location : MENZIES
Call number: S559.92.C6.B38 3.ptie
Happy reading.
cathai@netzero.net to vsg
Hi David,
Could you please tell me where you got information about Dr. J. C. Baurac and his work ?
Thanks,
Calvin
David A Biggs <david.biggs@ucr.edu> to Vietnam
Hi Calvin & Group-
Sure. Baurac discusses his work at the end of Cochinchine et Ses
Inhabitants - Partie Troisieme - Tome II. Its not much, just about ten
pages that follow his monograph style descriptions of Cochinchina province
by province. Baurac also published some medical articles in French
scientific journals - i don't have the citations handy. But I am pretty
sure he went through the Service du Medicines Navales with its Archives du
Medicines Navals (AMN) located in Bordeaux. If you are by any chance in
France and have time to visit, I'm sure folks on the list and I would
appreciate any light you can shed on this archives. Some extra web
research produced a possible geneological link for J.C. to a J. Baurac of
Dordogne who was the proprietor of a vineyard and in the 1880's produced
scientific papers on the nature of some blights that regularly destroyed
French vines. I imagine J.C. might have been the son of this wealthy family
going to school in the decades of strong republican influence in French
government when Pasteur made his key discoveries about fermentation. Its
plausible that a son of a wealthy vineyard operator followed Pasteur's
model in the 1880's (Institut Pasteur) and took expensive cameras with him
(a rich man's hobby) to Indochina, and spent the next ten years "doing
science" in the service of the mission civilisatrice. It was also at this
time that Alexander Yersin, working for Messageries Maritimes, came to
Indochina (1890) and in 1894 discovered the source of the pathogen for
pneumonic plague in Hong Kong. I'm finding that in addition to cholera,
plague was also another endemic problem. One report mentions that in 1841,
Nguyen forces conquered a resistant Khmer movement at Soc Trang, 3/4 of the
Khmer population died from bubonic plague -- a staggering percentage for
any epidemic (BSEI. Monographie de Soc Trang). If these numbers are true,
then this might help explain why the mekong delta was so under-populated
from the 1700's on when Viets and Chinese (and later French) started
immigrating here.
David