Global Movements, Local Concerns: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia ed. by Laurence Monnais and Harold J. Cook (review)

This is an edited collection of papers from an international conference (the first of its kind state the editors) on the history of medicine in Southeast Asia held in January 2006 at Wat Damnak Monastery, Siem Reap, Thailand. From the twenty-three papers presented at the conference, eleven were selected for this volume edited by Laurence Monnais and Harold Cook. The editors’ claim that the chapters “reflect the diversity, the spirit of exchange, and the exploratory nature of this conference” is largely upheld (p. xii). Edited volumes of conference papers can often be of uneven quality and tenuously linked; in this case all the contributions add some new insights. Covering the period from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, these chapters explore a variety of themes: continuities between the colonial and postcolonial contexts, the modernization of traditional medical systems, and the politics of health, from the perspectives of anthropology, history, sociology, and political science. As such it makes for a rich and stimulating volume, although of the eleven countries that make up Southeast Asia today only five are covered in this volume and two of those (Philippines and Malaysia) have already received attention from historians of medicine. However, commendably this is an opportunity for younger and local scholars to present their work.

Thomas Colvin and C. Michele Thompson present case studies of the spread of smallpox vaccination in the early nineteenth century. Using hitherto untapped sources in archives around the globe, Colvin focuses on the Filipino leg of the Balmis Expedition chartered by the Spanish king to take a vaccine to the Spanish Empire in 1803. This was, he argues, “one of the most remarkable humanitarian expeditions of all time” that achieved its objective by establishing “a continuous chain . . . of arms spanning two-thirds of the globe” (p. 17). The expedition arrived in Manila in 1805 with twenty-six boys as vaccine carriers. A year later it was estimated that twenty thousand Filipino children had been vaccinated as a result. Whereas Colvin’s chapter explores a colonial transfer from the center to the periphery, Thompson highlights the unique case of Vietnam when the indigenous rulers, Emperors Gia Long and Minh Mang, independently sought the vaccine, having obtained the information about this technique from a visiting French ship.

Raquel Reyes, Liesbeth Hesselink, and Ayo Wahlberg provide further examples on that complex encounter between “traditional” and “Western” medical systems. Both Reyes and Hesselink draw on some fascinating local sources to explore the denigration of indigenous medical practitioners; Reyes’s illustrations of the Filipino traditional midwife, the hilot, in the nineteenth century are particularly compelling. Wahlberg in turn shows how “traditional” medicine of Vietnam was constructed as part of the creation of Vietnamese cultural identity in the second half of the twentieth century.

Liew Kai Khiun suggests that there is still much to say about the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in furthering a participatory public health culture. Annick Guénel’s chapter on the 1937 Bandung Conference on rural development highlights continuities by illustrating how the debates at the conference on equity in health care prefigured the global primary health care movement of the 1970s. Ooi Keat Gin’s exploration of the Malaya’s antiopium movement exposes the divergent political and economic interests and like Reyes and Hesselink points to the important role played by Western trained doctors. Two chapters examine responses to epidemic disease in the twentieth century. Michael Vann focuses on French efforts to deal with cholera in Hanoi and reveals a familiar pattern of oppressive and intrusive measures acting differentially upon the city’s nonwhite population and thus obstructing the public health objectives. Yu-Ling Huang adds a contemporary account of Thailand’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic that draws attention to the limitations imposed on freedom of action by economic factors and globalization. Last, Chatichai Muksong and...