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  • Healers on the Colonial Market: Native Doctors and Midwives in the Dutch East Indies by Liesbeth Hesselink
  • Hans Pols
Liesbeth Hesselink . Healers on the Colonial Market: Native Doctors and Midwives in the Dutch East Indies. Leiden, Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2011. viii + 376 pp. Ill. €34.90 (978-90-6718-382-6). Available as an e-book at http://oapen.org/search?identifier=400271;keyword=hesselink.

The beginnings of medical education in the Dutch East Indies were both modest and inconspicuous. The Batavia Medical School started in 1851 as a two-year training course for young Javanese men to assist with the vaccination campaigns against smallpox. A few rooms were set apart at the military hospital in Weltevreden (today's central Jakarta), some distance inland from the unhealthy settlements near the harbor. The establishment of this training course took quite a bit of bureaucratic wrangling and extensive consultations between the various branches of the colonial administration and the Minister of Colonies in the Netherlands. Over the following decades, the training course was extended, the level of teaching raised, and a preparatory school established. In the early twentieth century, it was renamed STOVIA (School ter Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen; School for the Education of Native Physicians) and it moved to new quarters. For the colonial administration, the school embodied the promises of modern Western medicine, which they felt was unquestionably superior to the indigenous healing practices of the Indies. By training indigenous young men (and a very [End Page 126] small number of women), they hoped to convince the population of the Indies of both the superiority of Western ways and the benevolence of the colonial administration. It also provided much cheaper medical personnel for which there was demand from the colonial public health service, businesses, and plantations. Providing medical training to young indigenous men from the Indies had some unexpected consequences as well: Many medical students became active in the political, social, and cultural movements that came into being during the first part of the twentieth century. Some of Indonesia's most radical nationalists were graduates of the STOVIA.

Hesselink's study is based on extensive and thorough archival and historical research. She details the founding and the growth of the Batavia medical school and the careers of its graduates and analyzes how they found a place in colonial society. Initially, most students came from the indigenous aristocracy. When the social position and remuneration of the medical graduates turned out to be rather modest, they lost interest. Later graduates came from the ranks of the lower aristocracy who hoped to bolster their social position through a modern, Western education. Hesselink relates how, unintentionally, the colonial government created with the dokter djawa school and the STOVIA a group of indigenous individuals who encountered various difficulties finding a place in colonial society. Because they were part of the state apparatus and thereby operated more or less independently from traditional hierarchies, the indigenous aristocracy was often displeased about their presence. These physicians aimed to become mediators between East and West by bringing the benefits of Western medicine to the indigenous population, but their education had alienated from the great majority. They were distrusted by the indigenous elite and the lower classes, but their European colleagues did not treat them as equals either. This ambivalent social position probably contributed to their at times radical perceptions of both traditional hierarchies and the nature of colonial society.

In addition to her description of the development of medical teaching until 1915, Hesselink explores the establishment of a training course for young Javanese women to become midwives. This initiative faltered because the graduates of these courses, generally young women, were not accepted by indigenous mothers, who generally relied on old and wise women who had assisted women giving birth for generations. The initiatives to educate indigenous midwives have thus far hardly received any historical attention. In her study, Hesselink focuses attention on medical initiatives that had the potential of ameliorating the health of Indonesian women and children and adds valuable new insights into the many difficulties that arose when colonial powers, through educational initiatives, attempted to spread hygienic insights among the indigenous population.

Hesselink explores the development...

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