A Doctor In Siam

Jacques M. May’s A Doctor in Siam is a vivid, often witty memoir of his eight years serving as chief surgeon at the French Hospital in Bangkok, physician to the Siamese Royal Court, and later professor of surgery in Hanoi. The 224-page second impression (Jonathan Cape, 1951) is a firsthand account bridging Western medical science and the mysteries of mid-20th-century Southeast Asia.

The strength of the book lies in May’s keen observational style, punctuated with dry humor and moments of cultural reflection. A Time review in 1949 describes it as “a winking kaleidoscope of Oriental reminiscences, studded with startling clinical notes”. He recounts exotic—and sometimes harrowing—cases: an enormous ovarian cyst, hernias “so gigantic” they defy Western comprehension, and a dying European opium addict whose demise starkly contrasts cultural attitudes toward life and death.

May’s interactions with Siamese society are equally compelling. He respects their fatalism, likening it to Taoist parables, while subtly highlighting the conflict between Buddhist acceptance and Western medical intervention.  Intimate anecdotes—such as being forbidden from touching a royal princess and encountering a morally relaxed French expatriate—add depth, humanizing both East and West.

Beyond its memoir quality, the book serves as a historic snapshot: medical practices in a rapidly modernizing Siam, Western medicine’s growth, and cultural exchanges of the early 1950s. It informed Jacques May’s later contributions to medical geography and tropical medicine, as scholars note his ecological approach blending geography and disease patterns.

The prose is accessible and engaging, though occasionally steeped in old-world paternalism: May’s European lens sometimes underscores colonial attitudes. Modern readers should be mindful of these nuances when interpreting his observations.

A Doctor in Siam is both a gripping medical memoir and a cultural chronicle. It captures the tension between tradition and modernity, East and West, clinical detachment and human empathy. May’s storytelling is witty and unpretentious, providing both professional insights and personal reflections. This little-known classic offers a rich look into postwar Southeast Asia—its vibrant societies and the surgeon who navigated them with skill, curiosity, and a sharp eye for detail.