History of Medicine in Southeast Asia

This article presents and discusses key evidence on medicine, healing and herbal remedies in premodern Indonesia. It focuses on literature in Sanskrit and Old Javanese from the 8th to the 15th century, as well as epigraphic documents from the same period. While many of the concepts encountered testifies to the transregional "Indospheric" and Sanskritic culture that characterises Southeast Asia in this period, one detects strong elements of localisation that make the therapies and ideas about healing unique to the cultural contexts of Java and Bali.

was built on amnesia, as Raphael Dalleo remarked. 35 The exceptional character of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines and in particular the emphasis on its benign and tutelary character became the rationalization of the colonial project. 36 Contemporary advocates of U.S. imperialism oftentimes described the U.S. colonial project as a benign "civilizing mission" rather than an act of violence and control. 37 Contemporaries argued that U.S. colonialism differed from its European counterpart in the way that Americans intended to build modern structures of colonial rule, reform the population and introduce scientific knowledge. 38 However, as Ann Foster argued, the acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines introduced colonialism, as "the reason for denying self-rule in those territories" was -among other things -behavioral and statehood ceased to be "the proffered goal." 39 As Julian Go noted, the American occupation of the Philippines should be defined as colonialism rather than imperialism, as the U.S. occupation involved "the explicit and often legally codified establishment of direct political domination over a foreign territory and peoples." 40 While the Philippines could strive for independence with an uncertain temporary perspective, Puerto Ricans were denied this option. 41 Moreover, violence and brutal military conquest were at the heart of the American occupation of the Philippines. During the war, as Julian

Epidemic of deadly diseases has been viewed as instrument of change. It can introduce modifications to affected population. The cholera outbreak in Panay at the advent of American rule was preceded by an epidemic of the same disease in Manila sometime in 1902. This serious public health crisis hastened the capitulation of the Panay population to foreign rule. The method adopted in this study is purely historical research. Archival materials, particularly primary sources, including basic concepts from the health sciences are vital materials for the formulation of this paper. This study took shape based on the assertion that the growth of public health in colonized countries served as a component of Imperialism. The outbreak began in Manila in March 1902, and rapidly spread to its neighbouring provinces until it reached Panay by August of the same year. Between 1902 and 1906, 33, 562 cases of cholera were recorded in Panay, and 23, 909 perished. This weakened the armed resistance to American aggression which hastened the capitulation of the provinces of Panay to another form of colonial rule. Alongside the establishment of Americansponsored provincial governments in the island, the Philippine Commission introduced a public health program designed to address the problems generated by the outbreak. This public health system served as reliable agent in the pacification campaign. The local residents expected the reappearance of the disease amidst its deadly presence in Manila. Viewed by experts as a sanitary problem, provincial governments and American health officials educated the public on the importance of sanitation and hygiene. Currently, experts confirm the belief that sanitation prevents an outbreak. This paper recommends further study on the contribution of outbreak of lethal diseases in shaping the 20 th century Philippine public health system.

Heiser, after visiting a hospital in Sulu, during an investigatory trip he conducted in 1916 for the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation (Notes 2: 537). Just a year earlier Francis Burton Harrison, the new governor-general of the Philippines, had forced Heiser to resign from his post as director of health. Now the wily, authoritarian hygienist, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, had an opportunity to return to the archipelago and make life difficult for those who sought-prematurely in his opinion-to "filipinize" the American colonial bureaucracy. In general, it was evident to him that health work had been degraded in his absence. The town of Legaspi, for example, had no latrines and was "filthy in the extreme" (2: 553). Heiser felt that Filipino infiltration of the public health service now meant that "politics seems to dominate everything for the worst" (2: 553). In Manila, "the dead spirit seems to pervade everything" (2: 570). "Natives" in the health service constituted a corps of pathetic imitators of American public health, carelessly supervising lowerclass imitative "natives" in the barrios. "There is a great inefficiency and the machine is big and ponderous and the fuel does little more than oil the wheels, and progress is small, but this is to be expected with native control." 1 As they all went dutifully, slowly, through the motions, producing unfaithful copies of the American originals, Heiser watched, gleefully reporting on their deficiencies. "In leaving Manila," he wrote, it was "a satisfaction to see the indestructible monuments of cement which I left on the landscape and which they will be unable to destroy" (2: 621). Wherever he went in the colonial Philippines, Heiser found imitation, theatricality, ornament, and politics. There were times when he was heartened by Filipino enthusiasm for his projects. "Hookworm treatment is very popular with the people," he reported on a later visit in 1925. They "have become greatly inter

The dissertation is a history of public health, medicine, and welfare in the late U.S. colonial Philippines. It argues that the late U.S. colonial period, roughly the late 1920s–1941, witnessed the emergence of the Sanidad, the health-centered welfare state that evolved from the health bureaucracy of the early years of colonial conquest. Already captured and predominantly administered by Filipino doctors, the Sanidad was endowed with an expansive public authority that encompassed various levels of policymaking and agenda-setting—from the departmental-ministerial, down to the level of the provincial municipio. At the eve of the Pacific War, the Sanidad's presence had been established throughout the Islands, from the capital Manila to the provinces. It deployed a variety of approaches, from the preventative to curative, from the medico-carceral to medico-technocratic, so much so that the Sanidad generated new forms of material, institutional, and symbolic power. Finally, the Sanidad brought about new articulations of health citizenship from several stakeholders, including public and private medical interests which clashed at various points in history on the issue of state-provided healthcare.

In the late nineteenth century, with industrial growth and the resulting mass urbanisation, tuberculosis represented a plague mainly among the poor social classes. The outdated and crowded Italian prisons (formerly old monasteries) during the early 1900s were insufficient to "host" the multitude of inmates condemned or waiting for judgment. Italian prisoners were beset by hunger and poor hygiene facilities. Clothes did not differ between winter and summer. The Criminal Sanatorium of Pianosa was officially inaugurated in 1907, but from the 1860s it had been set up to host an agricultural penal colony. Here we report the excellent results obtained between 1907 and 1909 in the management of tuberculosis among prisoners in Pianosa, where surgery was also available. In those times, climate therapy with an enriched and varied nutrition was the only effective treatment for tuberculosis. Overall, of the 913 prisoners housed in Pianosa in that period and according to the acknowledg...

The US tuberculosis (TB) movement pioneered many of the strategies of modern public health campaigns. Using newly transcribed mortality data at the municipal level for the period 1900–1917, we explore the effectiveness of public health measures championed by the TB movement, including the establishment of sanatoriums and open-air camps, prohibitions on public spitting and common cups, and requirements that local health officials be notified about TB cases. Our results suggest that these and other anti-TB measures can explain, at most, only a small portion of the overall decline in pulmonary TB mortality observed during the period under study. (JEL H51, I12, I18, N31, N32)

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In 1949, newly-independent Indonesia inherited a health system that was devastated by seven years of warfare resulting from three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation and four years of revolutionary struggle against the Dutch. The country suffered from an acute shortage of physicians, and those few physicians were mostly concentrated in the large urban centres where a minority of the population lived. Additionally, the Indonesian Ministry of Health had to cope with the resurgence of epidemic diseases such as smallpox and endemic diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and yaws. The Ministry of Health had initiated a number of symbolic public health initiatives-both during the Indonesian Revolution (1945 to 1949) and during the early 1950s resulting in a noticeable decline of mortality. These initiatives fuelled the newly-independent nation's confidence because they demonstrated to the international community that it was capable of standing on its own feet. The early 1950s were thus a period of great optimism in Indonesian public health. Unfortunately by the mid-1950s, Indonesia's public health program faltered due to a constellation of factors (a) political tensions between Java and the Outer Islands; (b) administrative problems particularly as the provincial and local governments implemented health policy but depended on the centre for the disbursement of finances; (c) political deadlocks; (d) corruption; (e) rampant inflation; and, (f) political instability. The optimism that characterised the early years of independence paved way for despair. The Soekarno era could therefore be interpreted as the era of bold plans and unfulfilled aspirations in Indonesian public health. This thesis relates the history of health of post-World War II Indonesia to the political history of the 1950s and critically examines the way in which promoting the health of the population became closely related with nation-building. Beginning 1950, Indonesian physicians appropriated military metaphors associated with the revolutionary struggle for independence in order to depict campaign against malaria, tuberculosis, yaws and leprosy as a struggle against the 'big four' endemic diseases that drained the overall vitality of the population. They

One of the commonest souvenirs for Europeans travelling in Asia or North Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries was an Oriental sore or bouton d'Orient. These were often named according to the place they were acquired, such as Aleppo evil, bouton d'Alep, Haleb choban (Turkish for Aleppo ulcer), clou de Biskra, clou de Mila, Delhi boil, Baghdad boil, Jericho boil, bouton de Crète, Caniotica (also in Crete), Balkh sore (in Afghanistan) and Penjdeh sore (in Turkmenistan).

It has been a long time since a volume examining medicine and health in Southeast Asia as a whole has been published. This is thus a long-awaited and welcome volume that deals with new and relatively unexplored issues for this region. This collection draws together papers presented at the first International Conference on the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMEOSEA) held in Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 2006. The editors, Laurence Monnais and Harold Cook, explain that the chapters were chosen for their relevance to 'the development of modern medicine in non-Western countries' (p. xii), a topic raised by Hormoz Ebrahimnejad, and 'the politics of health in Southeast Asia' (p. xii). They divide the volume into three parts, 'global health and transnational healthcare initiatives since the early nineteenth century', 'the processes of negotiation and appropriation of the biomedical model', and 'the construction of national politics of modern health' (pp. xii-xiii). Thomas B. Colvin's chapter focuses on the early vaccination campaign in the Philippines, the Real Expedicion de la Vacuna, led by the Spanish king's court doctor, Francisco Xaxier Balmis, between 1803 and 1807. Colvin's research sheds new light on the Expedition, showing that there was considerable local cooperation, especially from the influential church, in the propagation of vaccination, as well as tensions between the metropole's imperial personnel and jealous colonial administrators who participated in the Expedition. While Colvin's fascinating narrative demonstrates the Expedition's success in arm-to-arm vaccination, it is unclear whether the Expedition faced problems from arm-to-arm operations, such as secondary infection among the children, which was a serious issue in British India. C. Michele Thompson examines the Nguyen court's own initiatives in obtaining effective vaccinia that led to the first successful vaccination in Vietnam in 1821, long before the onset of French colonization. At least one other indigenous court in the region, that of the Konbaung Dynasty in Burma, requested Western doctors to perform vaccination on the royal children before British colonization. Nevertheless, as Thompson stresses, the Nguyen court's substantial efforts to acquire effective vaccinia and its sponsorship of a vaccination clinic stands out as an unusually determined

The bilateral relations between Indonesia-Malaysia since the independence of Indonesia can be categorized in three phases. The first is the phase of Soekarno as the first president of Indonesia where his foreign policy towards Malaysia was to confront Malaysia due to his ideology of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Soekarno emerged as the trigger factor of the neo-colonialism in Southeast Asian nations as Malaysia was perceived to be the puppet of the British government to arouse interest in Southeast Asia. Hence, Soekarno created Ganyang Malaysia foreign policy or “Crush Malaysia”. The second phase, under President Soeharto, included harmony and full of cooperation between Indonesia and Malaysia. Soeharto normalised the bilateral relations with Malaysia since he considered Malaysia to be an important ally in cooperating with the western countries such as Great Britain, Australia and the United States. As a result, Indonesia and Malaysia along with Thailand, Philippines and Si...

The essay provides an analysis of the Philippine public health system. It enumerates the various reasons as to why the late U.S. Philippine public health was an entirely different insular executive agency from its previous form in the early 1900s. The essay then investigates the efforts to devolve some of Manila’s capacities to provincial governments. Finally, it relates these efforts’ success to the public health system’s maturation from a carceral-by-default colonial sanitary regime to one that provided lifesaving public goods.

Writing about the history of medical education in Southeast Asia presents a formidable task, especially in a region that has a plurality of medico-cultural traditions under colonial and postcolonial experiences. However, this did not deter Hans Pols, C. Michele Thompson, and John Harley Warner to put together an edited collection that not only adequately represents the countries of the region but also situates these
accounts within the global history of medicine. Translating the Body is a welcome addition to the growing historical literature on medical education and an excellent contribution to Southeast Asian studies as well. Written clearly, this book is a must readfor historians and students of medicine, global health, and Southeast Asia.

The present article will discuss how tuberculosis came into official discussion in the context of colonial Bengal since the twentieth century and what its nature was. Tuberculosis as a social malady will be understood here in the historical context. Besides, various antituberculosis actions will be examined briefly.

It is really wonderful what America has done in the Philippine Islands in the space of 20 years. In Manila, e.g., has brought water from the mountains instead of from the contaminating river; has given a sanitary system where none existed before; has established up-to-date hospitals; an asylum for the insane who were previously chained to the posts and floors; splendid schools and colleges; public libraries; model prisons; Y.M.C.A.s; a Parliament, municipal councils, pest offices, savings banks, telegraphs and telephones, roads, railways, wharves and quays. These are, in brief, a few of the things the American occupation has accomplished. I will now describe some of these at a little more length.

The cholera epidemic of 1902-1904 in Manila shares striking similarities with the outbreak of plague in Bombay in 1896, particularly in the colonial responses of the American and British governments respectively. The heavily interventionist and militarist sanitary methods used by each power were masked by the façade of scientific neutrality and colonial efficiency, but each regime encountered resistance to their policies from the Filipino and Indian populations. This thesis explores and compares the plague and cholera epidemics, with an emphasis on what made each outbreak unique within its own context, and on their similarities despite the perceived difference between each colonial power. At the core of this thesis is the question of how colonial governance and indigenous responses to it were conceptualised in the context of the disease epidemics. An analysis of official government accounts of each epidemic demonstrates that, despite their claims to the contrary, colonial thinking and discrimination always undermined the scientific values that the British and American regimes so often espoused.

My thesis aims to examine the social and medical development of the Blood Service of England and Wales, with a focus upon the job roles and occupational skills of the medical and non-medical staff. The thesis begins with the origins of the Blood Service in the 1920s and continues the examination into the early 2000s when the service merged with other services specialising in organ donation and plasma products. One of the key findings, which has implication for other medical skills and technologies, is how such skills are 'devalued' by being passed through occupational hierarchies. The Blood Service of England and Wales was established as a large scale healthcare service in World War II and expanded considerably postwar as the National Blood Transfusion Service, part of the newly created NHS. The origins of the service can be traced back to Camberwell, London. In 1921 the British Red Cross, at the initiative of Percy Lane Oliver, ran a blood donation session at King's College Hospital. For this pioneering transfusion the veins of the donor were cut open to extract blood and then tied back together. From this beginning, Oliver established a London based mobile service which increased activity from thirteen donations in 1922 to four hundred and twenty eight in 1925. Later, in 1937 the first permanent blood bank was opened in Ipswich. These plans were advanced during the Second World War, where the high casualty rate increased the demand for blood and technological developments led to blood collections becoming possible on a larger scale. The Blood Service grew rapidly during the 1950s, fuelled in part by advances in new surgical techniques, such as open heart surgery, which increased the demand for blood and by 1966 the number of registered blood donors surpassed one million for the first time. Whilst the scope of the operations of the Blood Service involves a wide range of serum and tissue work its key purpose is the collection of blood from donors. Here whole blood (red cells) is collected from donors by a specialist technique called venepuncture, whereby blood is removed through the antecubital fossa using a needle and is transferred into a specially designed plastic bag. The amount of blood collected per donation is one 'unit' (equivalent to 450 millilitres of blood, usually collected within ten minutes and which represents around thirteen percent of the total blood volume in the average human body). Collected blood is transferred to a blood bank for purification (cell separation); safety testing and the addition of chemicals which extend the expiry time to twenty-eight days. From the research in the Blood Service one of the most interesting historical processes is the change to occupational skills and the transfer of some occupational and medical skills downwards through the occupational hierarchy. This was most notable in terms of venepuncture and the historical change in status of this skill appears inversely related to the increase in blood donations and expansion of the workforce. In the period prior to the 1950s, blood transfusion was undertaken on a relatively small-scale. The blood collection process was very labour-intensive and the donation processes was administered by physicians, with nurses in a support role supported by volunteers. Despite the heavy reliance on volunteers the majority of the tasks undertaken-blood collection, blood processing and blood transfusion-required the use of relatively sophisticated medical techniques. During the 1930s and 1940s a

Although traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been a part of the Malaya and the Malaysia people's method of maintaining health and well-being for many centuries, it was never been enrolled in the public health-care system. However, the rising cost of Western drugs and the increasing number of people frequenting TCM has driven the government to search for cheaper options and to look into its safe practice. In 1992, the government mandated all TCM herbal products to be registered with the National Pharmaceutical Control Bureau. All TCM products sold in Malaysia are now Good Manufacturing Practice certified. The government has also established a Traditional and Complementary Medicine Division within the Ministry of Health. Between 2008 and 2014, a traditional and complementary medicine unit was set up in major hospitals in all states. TCM is one of the main services offered by the unit. In 2016, the government enacted the Traditional and Complementary Medicine Act to regulate the TCM practice. Subsequently, a 10-year blueprint has been drawn to support the development of all traditional and complementary medicines in Malaysia. This article aims to provide a brief overview on the regulatory development of TCM in Malaysia.

The education and research of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in Malaysia started coincidentally circa Malaysia's independence movement. Before the independence, much of the development focused on establishing treatment centers and Chinese medical halls to provide TCM treatment. Periodicals and journals advocating TCM and its advancement were published between the 1940s and 1960s, but many did not survive after a few issues. The challenge posed by the Immigration Ordinance 1952 further united TCM practitioners and TCM associations to establish the Chinese Medical Institute of Malaya. The trend gained momentum, and many educational institutes were set up in each of Malaysia. From the 1970s, Malaysia started hosting regional and international TCM conferences. In 2000, TCM education in Malaysia had finally gained recognition from the government. A TCM program standard was thus released by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA). To date, there are seven private higher education institutions which offer TCM programs based on the MQA standards and have established international collaborations with other universities. It is projected that Malaysia's TCM education and research will grow further as a result of China's Belt and Road initiative.

The increasing number of TCM practitioners and herbal suppliers, both of which accelerated by the formation of various TCM institutions, substantiated the creation of regional traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) associations in post-World War II Malaya. In response to the restrictions and levies imposed by the British colonial government, these regional associations united and formed a national organisation now known as the Federation of Chinese Physicians and Medicine Dealers Association of Malaya (FCPMDAM). The current designated TCM practitioner body, the Malaysian Chinese Medical Association (MCMA) were also originally established to nurture local talents in the face of import restrictions. Owing to difference with MCMA, a separate association named the Federation of Chinese Physicians and Acupuncturists Associations of Malaysia (FCPAAM) was setup in 2003 to absorb self-studied and patrimonial-educated TCM practitioners.

In this essay I seek to examine the prewar roots of U.S. bilateral health missions in the 1930s U.S.-occupied Philippines. George C. Dunham, who was the chief of the Institute for Inter-American Affairs (IIAA) in the 1940s, led the construction of health infrastructure of many Latin American countries during the wartime period. The IIAA’s main bureaucratic mechanism for health agenda-setting in Latin America, dubbed as the Servicio model, was later taken by the U.S. Department of State as the template for bilateral health programs under the United States Operations Missions (USOM) that implemented Point Four economic development aid in Third World countries during the Cold War. I seek to foreground the Servicio’s prominent features by exploring Dunham’s career as the technical adviser in public health of the U.S. Insular Government in the Philippines in 1931–35. Dunham was responsible for numerous health and development policy initiatives in the Philippines during a crucial time when the colony’s political independence was nearing and a New Deal liberal served as its last American governor-general. The essay argues that Dunham’s career—specifically, the power relations that he came to be familiar with; the forces of obstructionism that he dealt with; and, most important, the structural elements that he did not dare challenge—prefigured the centralizing and antipolitical nature of technocratic authority that he transplanted in Latin American via the IIAA, which later became the agenda-setting template for U.S. bilateral health missions.

This paper examines the everyday politics of Hansen's Disease (HD) patients in Culion Island, Philippines from 1900 to 1930s. As part of the American colonial project to address HD in the Philippines, American colonial health authorities segregated HD patients from the larger Philippine society by establishing the Culion Leper Colony where they exercised disciplinary power over the patients by providing them with material benefits and medical treatment as proof of benevolence. American disciplinary power, however, denied autonomy to the patients. Thus, patients challenged the prevailing colonial order through unofficial acts of disobedience such as rejection of labor and treatment, gambling, secret courting and riot, which contributed to reclaiming autonomy and dignity of their lives for themselves.

This paper examines the everyday politics of Hansen's Disease (HD) patients in Culion Island, Philippines from 1900 to 1930s. As part of the American colonial project to address HD in the Philippines, American colonial health authorities segregated HD patients from the larger Philippine society by establishing the Culion Leper Colony where they exercised disciplinary power over the patients by providing them with material benefits and medical treatment as proof of benevolence. American disciplinary power, however, denied autonomy to the patients. Thus, patients challenged the prevailing colonial order through unofficial acts of disobedience such as rejection of labor and treatment, gambling, secret courting and riot, which contributed to reclaiming autonomy and dignity of their lives for themselves.

The significance of hemorrhage was not immediately apparent to the medical community.  Medieval surgeons considered blood to be one of the four humors, levels within the human body needed to be managed rather than conserved.  Inflammation, or excess accumulation of blood, was considered a bigger risk than blood loss.  Conventional wisdom was transformed with William Harvey's (1578-1657) observation that blood circulated within a closed system.  Eighteenth -century surgeons began employing crude tourniquets to stop hemorrhage during amputation, dramatically increasing the chances of survival for the patient.  Jean Louis Petit (1674-1750) developed a tourniquet that used a screw mechanism to keep the band constricted instead of requiring an assistant for that task and his design was widely used for the next two centuries. As the application of anesthesia became more sophisticated by the turn of the twentieth century, surgeons had more time to perform surgical procedures employing improved techniques to prevent blood loss.  Hemorrhage control became a first aid issue.  First responders, known as corpsman or combat medics, were trained in basic lifesaving techniques relying on bandages to stem blood loss.  The tourniquet had become a first aid technique, whose use was discouraged.  When it was possible for a surgeon to save a limb, the risk of damage to the limb by a tourniquet left on too long was considered a greater risk than hemorrhage.  However, by the late 1980’s, when it was recognized that up to one-third of all combat deaths resulting from exsanguination could have been prevented with the use of more effective hemorrhage methods, the U.S. Army’s Combat Casualty Care Research Program focused on the development of more effective hemostatic products than gauze. The first prototype of Dried Fibrin Sealant Dressing applicable to trauma surgery was developed at the Letterman Army Institute of Research in early 1993.  This innovation led to the development of chitosan and fibrin dressings which have widely been used on the battlefield to arrest hemorrhage.  A new generation of tourniquets was developed and has become a standard component in the Individual First Aid Kit.  This success changed the approach to trauma care leading to the development of civilian applications of this approach. On Oct. 6, 2016, President Obama unveiled the “Stop the Bleed” campaign to empower bystanders to act as immediate responders. Working with the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, FEMA, the private sector, not-for-profit organizations, and the medical community, the “Stop the Bleed” campaign aims to raise awareness of life-saving strategies and provide public access to bleeding control tools already used by first responders and the military.
Learning Objectives
o Describe how an understanding of the importance of hemorrhage has evolved.
o Describe the development of technological interventions to control hemorrhage.
o Understand the influence of science on the practice of medicine.

The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies is pleased to announce a call for papers for the spring/summer 2016 issue of Asia Pacific Perspectives. This special issue will focus on the history of medicine, healing and the body across Asian cultures from the 16 th century -present.

Talensi materia medica is varied, encompassing plant, mineral, and animal substances. Healing, medicines, and medicinal practices and knowledge can be shrine-based and linked with ritual practices. This is explored utilising ethnographic data and from an archaeological perspective with reference to future possibilities for research both on Talensi medicine and, by implication, more generally through considering the archaeology of Talensi medicine preparation, use, storage, spread, and disposal. It is suggested that configuring the archaeology of medicine shrines and practices more broadly in terms of health would increase archaeological visibility and research potential.