Healing the Nation: Politics, Medicine and Analogies of Health in Southeast Asia (version 1.0) (original) (raw)
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Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 2013
It has been a long time since a volume examining medicine and health in Southeast Asia as a whole has been published. This is thus a long-awaited and welcome volume that deals with new and relatively unexplored issues for this region. This collection draws together papers presented at the first International Conference on the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMEOSEA) held in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 2006. The editors, Laurence Monnais and Harold Cook, explain that the chapters were chosen for their relevance to 'the development of modern medicine in non-Western countries' (p. xii), a topic raised by Hormoz Ebrahimnejad, and 'the politics of health in Southeast Asia' (p. xii). They divide the volume into three parts, 'global health and transnational healthcare initiatives since the early nineteenth century', 'the processes of negotiation and appropriation of the biomedical model', and 'the construction of national politics of modern health' (pp. xii-xiii). Thomas B. Colvin's chapter focuses on the early vaccination campaign in the Philippines, the Real Expedicion de la Vacuna, led by the Spanish king's court doctor, Francisco Xaxier Balmis, between 1803 and 1807. Colvin's research sheds new light on the Expedition, showing that there was considerable local cooperation, especially from the influential church, in the propagation of vaccination, as well as tensions between the metropole's imperial personnel and jealous colonial administrators who participated in the Expedition. While Colvin's fascinating narrative demonstrates the Expedition's success in arm-to-arm vaccination, it is unclear whether the Expedition faced problems from arm-to-arm operations, such as secondary infection among the children, which was a serious issue in British India. C. Michele Thompson examines the Nguyen court's own initiatives in obtaining effective vaccinia that led to the first successful vaccination in Vietnam in 1821, long before the onset of French colonization. At least one other indigenous court in the region, that of the Konbaung Dynasty in Burma, requested Western doctors to perform vaccination on the royal children before British colonization. Nevertheless, as Thompson stresses, the Nguyen court's substantial efforts to acquire effective vaccinia and its sponsorship of a vaccination clinic stands out as an unusually determined
Social History of Medicine, 2007
This article reflects on theories and methodologies that have characterised the field of the history of colonial medicine over the last couple of decades. It discusses the merits and flaws of hitherto predominant conceptual paradigms that concerned themselves mainly with issues of power, governmentality, the status of modernity and the 'condition' of the colonisers and the colonised. The recent shift in research focus from western or colonial medicine to the multiplicity of indigenous medicines is assessed as a potentially more nuanced, balanced and adequately theoryfocused as well as evidence-driven approach. It is argued that the seemingly irreconcilable tension and at times unhelpful hostility between proponents of Fanonian and Foucaultian paradigms on the one hand and archival data-focused historians of medicine on the other needs to be overcome lest researchers continue to be caught up in either ideologically fraught and conceptually misleading east versus west bifurcations or narrowly framed local case studies. Rather than discerning the end of social history of medicine research on south Asia, the author suggests that there is much scope and indeed urgent need for a social history of medicines in south Asia that is guided by crisp theory and at the same time anchored in the richly textured fabric of a wide range of economic, political, cultural and socio-historical sources.
Medicine and Soft Power Politics in Inner Asia, 1920s - 1930s
Building up the European healthcare system in the national autonomies of the RSFSR and health improvement of the indigenous peoples was a serious task with geopolitical dimensions in mind. Not only did the Bolsheviks plan to stop the depopulation of the frontier regions by radically improving the quality and reach of medical services, but they also hoped to transmit through the national borders a positive image of a new Soviet man to attract whom they called “the oppressed peoples of the Orient” to socialist lifestyle. In doing so they first tackled the problems of social diseases among the Mongolian-speaking Buryats using the international expertise, and then used the methods and practices approbated in the Baikal region in the neighboring Mongolia. The Buryats were assigned the role of soft power agents of the Soviets and frequently worked in medical expeditions in Mongolia. In this way, building up of a new healthcare provided the transnational historical context within which ideas, scientific methods and practices were transferred above the national borders and served a geopolitical role of a soft power. This paper seeks to examine the transnational context of medical and scientific cooperation between international teams of physicians in the Baikal region and Mongolia in the late 1920-s – mid-1930s. One of the goals of this piece is to analyze how medicine was used as an instrument of political influence and how medical ideas and practices were adapted to serve geopolitical goals in heterogeneous political and cultural conditions of Inner Asia. In addition, the authors will produce several maps of geopolitical influence that will foster understanding of geopolitical processes in the chosen historical period.
From History of Colonial Medicine to Plural Medicine in a Global Perspective
Ntm, 2009
This article reflects on theories and methodologies that have characterised the field of the history of colonial medicine over the last couple of decades. It discusses the merits and flaws of hitherto predominant conceptual paradigms that concerned themselves mainly with issues of power, governmentality, the status of modernity and the 'condition' of the colonisers and the colonised. The recent shift in research focus from western or colonial medicine to the multiplicity of indigenous medicines is assessed as a potentially more nuanced, balanced and adequately theoryfocused as well as evidence-driven approach. It is argued that the seemingly irreconcilable tension and at times unhelpful hostility between proponents of Fanonian and Foucaultian paradigms on the one hand and archival data-focused historians of medicine on the other needs to be overcome lest researchers continue to be caught up in either ideologically fraught and conceptually misleading east versus west bifurcations or narrowly framed local case studies. Rather than discerning the end of social history of medicine research on south Asia, the author suggests that there is much scope and indeed urgent need for a social history of medicines in south Asia that is guided by crisp theory and at the same time anchored in the richly textured fabric of a wide range of economic, political, cultural and socio-historical sources.
Colonial Politics of Medicine and Popular Unani Resistance
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Modern medicine has emerged as a crucial means to study colonial technologies of domination. Indian sub-continent-a crucially central colony of British empire-could not have escaped from being subjected to colonial binaristic construction of medicine. It was however not an easy go for modern medicine.