Imperial Contagions Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia
Posted: December 22nd, 2012 | No Comments »In the wake of SARS, avian flu and the rest a time to look back on responses to contagions previously seems apt…Imperial Contagions is also a nice title!
“This substantial collection greatly enriches our understanding of medicine, disease, and policy in colonial Asia. The contributors, from a range of disciplines, grapple fruitfully with questions surrounding medical space and the shift from enclavism to public health. In doing so, they make important theoretical and empirical contributions to medical and imperial history.” — David Arnold, author of Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India  Â
- Argues there was no straightforward shift from older, enclavist models of colonial medicine to newer pursuits of prevention and treatment among indigenous populations and European residents.
– Shows that colonial medicine was not at all homogeneous “on the ground” but was riven with tensions and contradictions.
- Challenges the long-standing belief that colonial regimes uniformly regulated indigenous bodies and that colonial medicine served as a “tool of empire.”Â
Robert Peckham is co-director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine and an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.
David M. Pomfret is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.
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