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3 Municipal Sanitary Surveillance, Asian Resistance, and the Control of the Urban Environment The science of sanitation ... is not hard to understand, and amounts to nothing more than carrying out cleanliness by scientific method.... Its laws, easily observed as they are, do not admit of neglect. Disregard of them swiftly brings down the penalty on the offending parties. The public health should override every other consideration when the prevention of disease is in question in a town like Singapore.! Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere .2 The Campaign for a Sanitized Environment in Colonial Singapore AT the heart of the colonialist's concern with sanitation lay the fundamental issues of demography: that is, population, morbidity, and mortality . From the perspective of the colonial administrator, this had two aspects. First, it involved the question of 'the continued vigour and vitality of the [European] race when transplanted from temperate to torrid zones'.3 At the height of Empire-building at the turn of the century, increasing numbers of British administrators, merchants, traders, and soldiers spent large parts of their lives in the colonies exposed to the ravages exacted by tropical conditions. The medical fraternity and the Colonial Office found it imperative to bring what were perceived to be largely climatic or environmental hazards prevalent in the tropical dependencies under some form of control. The setting up of Schools of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool and London in 1898 and 1899, respectively, to investigate 'tropical diseases' on 'systematic and scientific lines' was, according to Sir William McGregor, 'but one of the many means devised or fostered by the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, for curtailing the toll of our fellow citizens in those insalubrious, over-sea territories of the empire,.4 3 Municipal Sanitary Surveillance, Asian Resistance, and the Control of the Urban Environment The science of sanitation ... is not hard to understand, and amounts to nothing more than carrying out cleanliness by scientific method.... Its laws, easily observed as they are, do not admit of neglect. Disregard of them swiftly brings down the penalty on the offending parties. The public health should override every other consideration when the prevention of disease is in question in a town like Singapore.! Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere .2 The Campaign for a Sanitized Environment in Colonial Singapore AT the heart of the colonialist's concern with sanitation lay the fundamental issues of demography: that is, population, morbidity, and mortality . From the perspective of the colonial administrator, this had two aspects. First, it involved the question of 'the continued vigour and vitality of the [European] race when transplanted from temperate to torrid zones'.3 At the height of Empire-building at the turn of the century, increasing numbers of British administrators, merchants, traders, and soldiers spent large parts of their lives in the colonies exposed to the ravages exacted by tropical conditions. The medical fraternity and the Colonial Office found it imperative to bring what were perceived to be largely climatic or environmental hazards prevalent in the tropical dependencies under some form of control. The setting up of Schools of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool and London in 1898 and 1899, respectively, to investigate 'tropical diseases' on 'systematic and scientific lines' was, according to Sir William McGregor, 'but one of the many means devised or fostered by the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, for curtailing the toll of our fellow citizens in those insalubrious, over-sea territories of the empire,.4 CONTESTING SPACE 86 Second, in port cltles like Singapore, where prosperity was largely dependent on entrepot trade and the energies of a continuous stream of Asian immigrants, the colonial state had also to look beyond the question of European demography and address the more intractable problems of Asian morbidity and mortality. Rampant spread of infectious diseases and high mortality rates would not only debilitate the local population, but cripple the colony's trade. That the latter was the colonial government's main preoccupation is clear from the reason given by the Colonial Secretary, J. A. Swettenham, for his injunction to the municipal commissioners to devise effective means of disease control within the municipality: The prosperity of Singapore so...

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