Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. viii, 250 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-253-01491-7.
Histories of Health in Southeast Asia is a welcome addition to the field of the history of medicine and health in Southeast Asia. The essays it contains will also, individually, be of value to historians of medicine and health in the non-western world in general and to scholars who study Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and/or Thailand in particular. This volume also contains interesting and quite detailed chapter insets on subjects such as the eradication of smallpox in Indonesia (Vivek Neelakantan), a survey of traditional medicine in Cambodia (Sokhieng Au), and an examination of what author Alberto G. Gomes terms the “Forest Peoples of Southeast Asia” and the destructive impact of environmental changes on them. The last mentioned of these also exemplifies the main strength of this book, namely that it attempts to address region-wide commonalities that affect medicine and health in particular ways in specific places or among specific groups and the socio-political implications of these patterns.
Indeed, the gracefully written essays by Rachel Leow (“Healing the Nation: Politics, Medicine, and Analogies of Health in Southeast Asia”) and Eric Tagliacozzo (“Pilgrim Ships and the Frontiers of Contagion: Quarantine Regimes from Southeast Asia to the Red Sea”) should be required reading for scholars who study nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southeast Asia, whether or not they themselves work on the history of medicine. Likewise Atsuko Naono’s excellent piece (“‘Rural’ Health in Modern Southeast Asia”), in which she examines the various definitions of what constitutes “rural,” has implications far beyond the field of the history of medicine, and beyond Southeast Asia for that matter, while Mary Wilson’s article (“Epidemic Disease in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asia”) does a fine job of explaining the ecological, economic, and demographic factors that contribute to Southeast Asia’s vulnerability to communicable diseases.
Histories of Health in Southeast Asia is a centennial offering of sorts for the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the China Medical Board (CMB) and its authors were recruited from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in order to examine “the social, cultural, demographic, and political dimensions of health in the widest possible sense” (2). With this as an editorial objective, this volume should have been not only of interest, but also of real use, to scholars of Southeast Asia who are not specialists in the history of medicine. Conversely, this book could also have been a gateway for medical historians into the study of Southeast Asia if it had been made more user friendly. A map indicating many of the places mentioned would certainly have helped. Even those of us who are Southeast Asianists do not necessarily know, without looking at a map, the different provinces of the Philippines and it is unreasonable to expect non-Southeast Asianists to have any idea about the location of ancient, but not internationally well-known, cities such as Ayutthaya and Hoi An.
Specific editorial interventions could also have made this book much more user friendly even for those of us who are scholars of both Southeast Asia and the history of medicine. Following conventions such as having birth and death dates for individuals discussed in the text noted on first mention of the individual would have helped, so would the translation of Southeast Asian terms on first use, brief explanations of rather specialized medical terms such as “chaulmoogra therapy” (191), and a list of acronyms for an article that uses at least thirty of them (Tadem, “The Role of Non-governmental Organizations in the Field of Health in Modern Southeast Asia”).
At its best academia is a gathering of communities of scholars who exchange information and ideas among themselves and who are in conversation with many others beyond their own group. This volume does not go as far as it should in aiming for scholars in the large number of fields it could attract. For example, reading the brief discussion (vii and 2) of the CMB, many scholars of Southeast Asia will have probably never heard of it, and many historians of medicine who do not study Asia may also never have heard of it. Yet one comes away from this volume’s discussion of the CMB only with the knowledge that it was founded in 1914, the inference (it is never explicitly stated) that it is part of the Rockefeller Foundation, and a list of places where the Rockefeller Foundation took “its experiments in public health” (Amrith and Harper, “Introduction,” 1). That’s all.
This volume was not intended to be a history of the CMB and thus one should not expect a full history of that institution here. However, the small amount of information presented appears to have been written for an audience that already knows a good bit about the CMB. But the many scholars of both Southeast Asia and the history of medicine do not have such information, and they are not going to get more here.
This is just one example, though others from this volume could be discussed, of the point that in an editorial sense this book aims at a rather narrow audience when many of its essays should actually be of interest, and use, to a much larger audience. Several of its essays would have had much broader resonance if they had received more guidance. The field of the history of medicine in Southeast Asia is fairly small and despite the problems that may exist with this volume, it is still a valuable addition to the literature on the subject and belongs on the bookshelf of any scholar with a serious interest in the subjects of health and medicine in Southeast Asia.
C. Michele Thompson
Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, USA
pp. 939-941