Almost all the doctors who worked in the French colonial empire passed through the École du Pharo, which played a key role in health policy in colonized territories.

Over the course of more than a century of existence, the École du Pharo was officially and consecutively known as: The formation of the French colonial empire posed the problem of its sanitary management by health professionals.

[2] These doctors were confronted on land with appalling epidemics among soldiers (yellow fever in Gorée in 1878, dysentery in the Far East between 1859 and 1861, cholera in Tonkin between 1884 and 1887, malaria during the Madagascar campaign in 1895, etc.)

The agreement signed in April 1905 between the city and the Ministry of War allocated to the new school the western part of the Jardin du Pharo, at the foot of the brand-new anatomy institute, opposite the field of maneuvers.

The creation of a colonial section at the École du service de santé militaire in Lyon in 1925[29][30] improved recruitment8 by around 25%, although it was still insufficient for the 70 million inhabitants of the French Empire at the time.

The Indochina War (1945-1954), which began with the Japanese coup of March 9, 1945, and continued with the opposition between France and the Viet Minh, was the deadliest conflict for the Colonial Medical Corps, which lost 34 officers, including 26 killed by the enemy, 5 duty casualties and 3 missing in action (mer[31]).

[20] Since the early 2000s, the evolution of the French armed forces' external commitments has been strongly oriented towards operations in combat situations, in which troops have a high rotation rate and support for civilian populations becomes a secondary activity.

As a result, the need for in-depth knowledge of tropical diseases, particularly infectious pathologies, loses its relative importance in terms of the emergency, disaster, and war medicine capacity requirements of French military doctors.

In 2008, as part of the government's "Révision générale des politiques publiques" (RGPP), a major reform of the armed forces was launched, underpinned by a drive for savings and rationalization.

[41] In June 2013, the École du Pharo bids farewell to Marseille;[42] during the ceremony marking the end of activities, the pennant is rolled up for the last time and will join the Armed Forces Biomedical Research Institute after more than 8,000 doctors and other healthcare professionals have been trained within its walls in their medical-tropical art6.

As a practical school, the Pharo cultivated an original approach to teaching, in which trainees were encouraged to carry out their procedures, and whose teachers were practitioners with solid experience in the field.

[46] Programs evolved over the years, but the training course for military physicians and pharmacists remained the main constant throughout history, with regular adaptations such as the introduction of new disciplines like psychiatry in 1928, ophthalmology in 1934, stomatology and radiology in 1935.

In addition, foreign military trainees from African countries come to follow courses in tropical medicine or specialties in partnership with and at the Hôpital d'instruction des armées Laveran.

[60] In 1980, faced with the growing risk of malaria among French forces deployed in Africa, due to the emergence of parasite resistance to available preventive treatments, the center created a major research laboratory dedicated to Plasmodium, organized into two units.

[64] The aim was to collect the plants traditionally used for food in Africa, to establish the exact species identification and then to define the biochemical composition, particularly the protein content, of the edible part.

[64] As soon as the laboratory was created, Léon Lapeyssonnie published his landmark study, in which he described for the first time the limits of the area of expansion of cerebrospinal meningitis epidemics in intertropical Africa.

For 50 years, this laboratory has tracked down meningococci on all five continents, and particularly in Africa,[67] enabling us to gain a better understanding of the evolution of the epidemiology of this disease, based on the extreme variability of the bacteria[68] and their sensitivity to antibiotics,[69] and proposing suitable diagnostic methods.

In Cameroon, faced with an epidemic of sleeping sickness, he developed a specific, mobile and systematic method of combating the disease, which would soon become the model for public health action for several generations of doctors who graduated from the Pharo School.

Colonial physicians had their skills recognized through a professional course of study known as "specialization in the fight against major endemics", whose very title shows that it concerned civilian populations, particularly in the African context.

[84] The creation in France of a Diplôme d'Etudes Spécialisées en Santé Publique et Médecine Sociale in 1985, open to both military and civilian doctors, led to the abolition of the specialty in the fight against major endemics, whose last specialists were appointed in 1990.

In 2011, in preparation for the closure of the École du Pharo, the Centre d'Epidémiologie et de Santé Publique des Armées (Army Epidemiology and Public Health Center) was created in Marseille, taking over all activities in this field in the armed forces.

In such cases, the school is able to provide all or part of an intervention team capable of investigating an epidemic in order to understand its causes, propose control measures and, where possible, implement a vaccination campaign.

This structure enables an investigation and control team to be mobilized at very short notice to deal with emerging diseases with high epidemic potential, such as meningococcal meningitis, measles, yellow fever and cholera.

Collectively or individually, the Pharo's teaching staff continued to publish scientific and historical works, from the Traité de pathologie exotique, clinique et thérapeutique by its first director Albert Clarac, published from 1909 in collaboration with Charles Grall, to Peau noire, dermatologie des peaux génétiquement pigmentées et des maladies exotiques[94] by Professor Jean-Jacques Morand, and Cas cliniques en médecine tropicale by Professors Pierre Aubry and Jean-Étienne Touze, from the school's Chair of Tropical Medicine.

In addition to its participation, the school was in the path of European delegations on their way to Algeria, all of which stopped off at the Pharo, coming from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, the League of Nations, etc.

The next step was to create a real network of hospital and health training facilities; open overseas Pasteur institutes to develop local research; and control the major tropical endemics.

As Félix Houphouët-Boigny, President of the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, said at the inauguration in Marseille on June 29, 1978, of the hospital that bears his name: "I am indefectibly grateful to the Dakar Medical School - of which he was a former student - and to his teachers, who were like you, Gentlemen, whom I see grouped around the Inspector General, Director of the Pharo Institute of Tropical Medicine, officers of this Overseas Health Service, who worked with such courage and dedication in the service of the people of Black Africa.

[104] In 1985, Professor François Jacob, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and a Companion of the Liberation, commented: "The Bordeaux, Lyon, and Pharo schools have succeeded in creating a new type of doctor: a competent physician, accustomed to working in very harsh conditions, often in the bush, without measuring either his efforts or his pain...

In his speech, entitled "Tribute to Heroes", Dr. J Donald Millar, former head of the smallpox eradication program in Africa, says: "We have come here today to say officially and personally, to the people of France and to the medical officers 'thank you' for this contribution to the history of humanity.

It projects two rays, one horizontal towards the distant tropics, the other illuminating the sea and the silhouette of a sailing ship, evoking the maritime origins of the Colonial Army Medical Corps.