Health and Place in Historical Perspective: Medicine, Ethnicity, and Colonial Identities

Abstract

This Special Issue includes articles fi rst presented as papers at a two-day symposium held at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, in February 2011.1 The event was designed to highlight a large Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden-funded research project, and to showcase current scholarly work in the fi eld of the colonial and postcolonial histories of medicine, with a focus on histories of insanity. We also included the themes of medical migration in New Zealand’s national history, the movement of medical ideas and personnel across empire, a close study of the uses of the term ‘neurasthenia’ in French-colonial Vietnam, and the relationship between place, plants, and health across South Asia and Australia in the nineteenth century. These topics were put into a broader scholarly context in an engaging keynote presentation focusing on health and place by Robin Kearns. As one of the editors of the journal Health and Place, Robin Kearns was interested to make connections in his address between this journal and the symposium, which focused on history. Speaking about the ways in which a concept of ‘place’ might be fully utilised, Kearns examined the ‘constellation of aspects’ of place, including the notions of belonging, inclusion and exclusion, and the multiple dimensions of place: it might be a location, or a locale, or a sense of place, or a felt place. By stretching the ‘traditional’ spatial meanings of place among geographers, Kearns argued, we might understand more deeply the signifi cance of ‘place’ for sectors of our own society, for instance, in the worlds of discharged psychiatric patients.2 Kearns talked about the crosscurrents in his own discipline of geography and its variety of uses for the term ‘place,’ also showing how geography and history might intersect along the lines of a shared fascination with heritage, memory, remembering, and understanding