The approving repetition, in a Red Cross publication no less, of Marshal Lyautey’s “well-known saying” that “the doctor acts as an agent of penetration, of conciliation and of pacification” still has the power to surprise. The convergence of Doctor and Marshal on the function of medicine in their time (the aftermath of the “Great War”) reminds us of the myriad ways in which Western medicine had become “naturalized” in new ecosystems shaped by European empires over the long nineteenth century. Travel, exploration, diplomacy, ethnographic or cadastral surveys, appeasement, torture, cure: all in the day’s work for the French toubib in Morocco and, decades later, for doctors fixing broken bodies during the Algerian War. Very likely, even those ambivalent about empire’s legitimacy in the post-Versailles era concurred with Lyautey’s other well-known formulation, a redeeming humanitarian alibi: “La seule excuse de la colonization c’est le médecin” (medicine is the only excuse for colonization).