Becoming a Catholic physician. A medical persona at the intersection of Belgium and the Belgian Congo (1890-1965).

This study traces the historical trajectory of the Catholic physician in Belgium and the Belgian Congo between 1890 and 1965. By conceiving the Catholic physician as a persona, an idealized model embodied by real historical actors, it will outline how doctors engaged with their faith throughout the recent past. The chronological framework of this research roughly covers the period of Belgian colonialism, from the firm institutionalization of germ theory as the basis of medical education at the end of the 19th century until the deinstitutionalization of Catholicism after Vatican II. Using the concept of persona to understand what it meant to be a Catholic physician offers a unique lens on how medicine and religion interacted. It allows to grasp ‘the Catholic doctor’ as an individual performance, as a collective ideal and as a cultural model.

The dissertation examines how religio-medical views and ideas took shape by approaching medical education in its broadest sense. Alongside academic hospitals, university auditoria and medical laboratories, medical societies and missionary posts also served as important sites for the creation and circulation of collective beliefs, moral standards and shared professional virtues. The doctoral thesis sheds light on the debates and discussions among pious doctors by approaching their discourse from three different angles: through journal analyses, institutional sources and oral history.

The first chapter sets the scene of academia in fin de siècle Belgium to trace the historical roots of the Catholic physician. It uncovers how pious doctors at the Catholic University of Leuven came to centre their professional identity around conceptions of medicine as a science. The ‘scientific’ quest for truth enabled Catholic doctors to consider their faith a source of professional inspiration and led a handful of Leuven-trained bacteriologists to Congo to pioneer research in tropical medicine.

The second chapter explains why Catholic physicians came to gather in medical societies outside of academia on the eve of the First World War. The fear of degeneration and depopulation In Belgium and the Belgian Congo prompted doctors with a strong sense of religiosity to articulate more ideologically charged views on medicine. They came to conceive of the medical profession as a medical apostolate. Being a doctor entailed the social and moral responsibility to preserve and expand ‘civilisation’.

Subsequently, the third chapter offers an in-depth analysis of Saint Luc Médical to describe the Belgian heyday of the Catholic physician. By taking the journal of the Saint Luc Society, the most outspoken Catholic medical society in Belgium, as its principal source, the chapter sheds light on the strengths and limitations of this persona at a time when the Church wanted to exercise an ever-greater surveillance on the intimate lives of the Catholic laity (1930-1951).

The fourth chapter only focuses on medical life in the Belgian Congo. It considers how the discourse on medical apostolate reacted to the colonial realities of missionary education by analysing medical handbooks, institutional correspondence, student press and oral testimonies. The establishment of the Kisantu School for Indigenous Medical Assistants (AMIs) in 1937 enabled Congolese subjects to become active providers of biomedical care. But it also confirmed their subordinate role in the colonial system.

Finally, the last chapter outlines how the persona of the Catholic physician eroded in the metropole and the colony. Student activism in Leuven and Lovanium caused the discourse on medical apostolate to lose meaning and social recognition in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite severe differences between the Belgian and Congolese contexts (especially the absence of a solid welfare state in the colony), both student populations invoked a personal and emancipated Catholic faith to criticise the Church, the (colonial) state and the university.