Reviewed by: Translating the Body: Medical Education in Southeast Asia ed. by C. Hans Pols Michele Thompson, and John Harley Warner Trais Pearson Hans Pols, C. Michele Thompson, and John Harley Warner, eds. Translating the Body: Medical Education in Southeast Asia. History of Medicine in Southeast Asia. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2017. ix + 370 pp. Ill. $34.00 (9789814722056). This volume is the most recent in a series of laudable contributions to the history of medicine in modern Southeast Asia.1 Like the earlier volumes, Translating the Body is a collection of fine-grained studies from across the region that contributes to conversations in the global history of medicine and health. Here though, medical education serves as a "historiographically strategic framework for understanding health and medicine in the region and for getting at wider questions about social, cultural, and political change and choice" (p. 29). Local agency is at the forefront of the volume. The titular idiom of translation is intended to capture this, as is the vehicle of education. In a lucid introduction, the editors—two specialists in the history of medicine in Southeast Asia (Pols and Thompson) and another with expertise in transnational and comparative approaches (Warner)—present medical education as a transformative experience for the aspiring healthcare professional and the community alike (p. 28), and pose compelling questions about the relationships between medicine, education, identity, and national belonging. But education—even the expansive (and compelling) sense of education laid out in the introduction—is arguably less central to some chapters than others. This quibble, of course, does not undermine the important work done in understudied areas like animal husbandry in Annick Guénel's contribution. The sheer breadth of the contributions, which bridge trans-Atlantic divides in scholarship and consolidate insights available only in vernacular language works, is a signal strength of the volume. The diversity of the contributors, in terms of geography, rank, and experience (several were/are scholar-practitioners in the fields of nursing, therapeutic massage, and development) is another. The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography (lacking in similar volumes) and a prodigious index that makes possible to trace topics like dukun bayis (traditional birth attendants in the Malay world) and the Rockefeller Foundation across several chapters. The chronological scope of the contributions is another strength, with entries covering late-colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary developments. There is, however, some discord here. Several chapters depict the turn of the twentieth century as a watershed (based on advances in Western therapeutics, and imperial ideologies), while others offer revisionist chronologies (Laurence Monnais, for example, highlights changing Vietnamese medicinal consumption habits after [End Page 158] world War I). Finally, while the chapters can be read productively as stand-alone entries, some effort to wrangle them into a more coherent shape would have aided readers. In that light, the remainder of this review considers potential thematic and conceptual convergences. Several chapters advance us beyond an earlier fixation on the analysis of colonial medical practice and discourse in favor of indigenous perspectives and agency. Francis A. Gealogo's analysis of the 1918 influenza pandemic inverts the American imperial logic best captured by Warwick Anderson's "excremental colonialism," revealing a subaltern discourse that might be labeled iatrogenic imperialism: a Filipino attempt to reframe disease as a product of American imperial interventions.2 Monnais similarly eschews medicine as a "tool of empire" in the service of the civilizing mission in order to consider "bottom-up health care demand and the importance of 'colonized (patient) agency'" (p. 265). Her analysis of vernacular sources (Vietnamese popular health magazines of the 1920s and 1930s) reveals the complex realities of individual decisions to adopt, adapt, or eschew the medicines of the imperial power (p. 256). Chapters by Michitake Aso, Jenna Grant, and Vivek Neelakantan all grapple with the growing pains of post-colonial states as they tried to train caregivers for the populace. Reformers and caregivers alike wrestled with limited resources, refracted forms of expertise in the form of competing regimes of authoritative Cold War science and a bewildering array of scientific lingua franca (Dutch, English, French, Russian, and Chinese), and service/loyalty to state and/or party. Decisions about foreign humanitarian aid were...
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Apr 28, 2020
Michael Gluzman 
Open Access
