author
Dorothée Chellier
1860–1930
Among the first women to qualify in medicine in French Algeria, she built a career in the 1890s by treating patients and traveling on demanding state missions into remote regions. Her journals offer a rare, firsthand view of women’s health, colonial medicine, and the barriers faced by a pioneering doctor.
1 Audiobook
Voyage dans l'Aurès: Notes d'un médecin envoyé en mission chez les femmes arabes
by Dorothée Chellier
About the author
Born in Algiers in 1860, Dorothée Chellier trained first as an officier de santé before completing a medical doctorate in 1894. Sources describe her as one of the earliest women doctors linked to French Algeria, and as the first female physician to practice there in the mid-1890s.
From 1895 to 1899, she was sent on a series of medical missions to places including the Aurès, M'zab, and Kabylie. Traveling in difficult conditions, she met women who were often inaccessible to male doctors and reported on pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, and everyday health concerns.
Chellier later became known through the publication of her journals, which historians value for both their medical observations and what they reveal about colonial society. Some sources differ on the year of her death, so that detail is best treated with caution.