The history of French colonial medicine oft en highlights the role of physicians, bacteriologists, and other medical scientists in providing treatment for troops, combating tropical diseases, and advancing the French medical mission in the indigenous milieu. These medical agents influenced both the nature and direction of colonial health care through their research, administration of medical institutions, and training of junior medical personnel. As the most influential representatives of French medicine, they left their imprint in countless numbers of medical reports and research pieces. But if French physicians were oft en seen as the leading faces of colonial health care, what role did indigenous medical personnel play in the history of colonial medicine? Western literature oft en underscored their subordinate and intermediary status in the colonial medical system, a position that earned them an évolué (evolved) status but that was not sufficient enough to be considered equal to their European counterparts. Although their inferior status made it difficult to have their voice heard in the grand narrative of colonial medicine, they contributed no less than French doctors in the combat against diseases and in improving medical services for the local population. In many aspects of colonial medicine, especially those that involved direct contact with the Vietnamese communities, these medical agents played an essential role in bridging the social and cultural gap between modern medicine and local traditions, an advantage that put them in the forefront of the state's medical campaigns.

In maternity services, certified Vietnamese midwives emerged as the most important medical agents in introducing French biomedical birth to local women. This chapter draws on a midwife's memoir, personnel files, and other colonial correspondence to offer insight into midwifery education, French medical culture, and midwives’ professional activities. Following the footsteps of these medical agents to many remote and rural maternity wards in Vietnam and Cambodia, my study looks behind the façade of medical campaigns and propaganda to reveal the hitherto discrete lives of Vietnamese midwives, which were rife with racial and gendered prejudices and tension. Although colonial midwives succeeded in popularizing Western childbearing practices in urban areas, they failed to gain a foothold in the countryside or in the remote highlands of Vietnam.