Suchergebnisse

Acclimatisation theories varied depending on the political and social contexts in which they were used. Historians of medicine have argued that the pessimism of physicians practising in British India about the acclimatisation of white settlers in the tropics increased around the turn of the eighteenth century. Both British and Dutch physicians had long commented on the proverbial unhealthfulness of Batavia, but rather than relating this to the tropical climate, they emphasised the unwholesome behaviour of Dutch inhabitants. When Dutch physicians debated the possibility of white settlement in the tropical East Indies in the 1840s, many emphasised the importance of virtuous predisposition and intelligent behaviour in adjusting to the colony's climate, suggesting optimistically that environmental problems might be resisted.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these 'anomalous blondes' of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.

AbstractThis paper examines a series of research trips undertaken by French physicians in Indochina to the Dutch East Indies between 1898 and 1937 to study what they saw to be a successful model of a modern psychiatric service that had been developed there. Dutch experiments with forms of "open door" care and the use of patient labor as therapy, premised on earlier ideas of moral treatment, seemed to hold both therapeutic promise and the key to resolving pressing economic concerns faced by colonial psychiatric institutions. French physicians saw in neighboring Java fundamental ethnological and geographical similarities to Indochina, and Dutch successes in psychiatric assistance there raised the prospect of adapting practices the Dutch had developed to their own program in Indochina throughout the interwar years.

Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress—not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first generation to receive training in biological science and to become socialized as professionals used this education to imagine itself as eminently modern, progressive, and cosmopolitan. Their training gave them special authority in deploying organic metaphors of society and state, and made them deft in finding allegories of the human body and the body politic. These scientists and physicians saw themselves as representing universal laws, advancing natural knowledge, and engaging as equals with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and North America. Science gave them a new platform for communication. In the British Empire, for example in India and Malaya, medical science also proved influential, though it seems lawyers cognizant of precedent and tradition more often dominated decolonization movements. This essay will examine how scientific training shaped anti-colonialism and nationalism in the Philippines and the East Indies, concluding with a brief comparison of the situation in Taiwan.

Involvement in warfare can have dramatic consequences for the mental health and well-being of military personnel. During the 20th century, US military psychiatrists tried to deal with these consequences while contributing to the military goal of preserving manpower and reducing the debilitating impact of psychiatric syndromes by implementing screening programs to detect factors that predispose individuals to mental disorders, providing early intervention strategies for acute war-related syndromes, and treating long-term psychiatric disability after deployment.

"In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship"--

Human variation represented a central research topic for life scientists and posed challenging administrative issues for colonial bureaucrats in the first half of the 20th century. By following scientists' and administrators' interests in innovating styles and tools for making and circulating documents, in reshaping landscapes and environments, and in fixing distances between humans, the book advances new understandings of the materiality of colonial institutional life and governance