Synopses & Reviews
Colonial Pathologies is a groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s. Warwick Anderson describes how American colonizers sought to maintain their own health and stamina in a foreign environment while exerting control over and andldquo;civilizingandrdquo; a population of seven million people spread out over seven thousand islands. In the process, he traces a significant transformation in the thinking of colonial doctors and scientists about what was most threatening to the health of white colonists. During the late nineteenth century, they understood the tropical environment as the greatest danger, and they sought to help their fellow colonizers to acclimate. Later, as their attention shifted to the role of microbial pathogens, colonial scientists came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipinosandrsquo; personal hygiene practices and social conduct.
A vivid sense of a colonial culture characterized by an anxious and assertive white masculinity emerges from Andersonandrsquo;s description of American efforts to treat and discipline allegedly errant Filipinos. His narrative encompasses a colonial obsession with native excrement, a leper colony intended to transform those considered most unclean and least socialized, and the hookworm and malaria programs implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, Anderson is attentive to the circulation of intertwined ideas about race, science, and medicine. He points to colonial public health in the Philippines as a key influence on the subsequent development of military medicine and industrial hygiene, U.S. urban health services, and racialized development regimes in other parts of the world.
Review
andldquo;Itandrsquo;s difficult to overstate the significance of this book. Its account of hygiene as the means for establishing andlsquo;biomedical citizenshipandrsquo; in the Philippines under U.S. rule is carefully crafted and powerfully argued. Sympathetically deconstructing the assertiveness and delusions of white colonial medical practitioners beset by the specters of native bodily excess, Warwick Anderson shows how race and biology defined civic identities in the colony and the metropole alike. A path-breaking work on imperial medicine, it is certain to attract a wide readership.andrdquo;andmdash;Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines
Review
andldquo;Colonial Pathologies does the work that many colonial histories profess to do but rarely carry out: it provides us with a meticulous, dynamic, and grounded analysis of how political rationalities were honed and colonial and colonized subjectivities were formed through the changing medical perceptions and practices of U.S. imperial policy. Not least, it demonstrates how Philippines colonial public health regimes provided the template for subsequent healthcare in the Philippines, in the United States, and in international health services more broadly.andrdquo;andmdash;Ann Laura Stoler, editor of Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History
Review
andldquo;An imaginative and well-informed study of what might be called the bodily dimension of imperial relationships in the Philippines. Warwick Anderson explores the subjective and multidimensional aspects of the formally humane and objective realm of tropical public health, illuminating the American colonial experience and foreshadowing ambiguities and paradoxes in what we have come to call global health.andrdquo;andmdash;Charles E. Rosenberg, author of No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought
Review
andldquo;Colonial Pathologies is a highly original work that, through the anxious eyes of its American architects, successfully illuminates the multidimensional U. S. colonial-medical state in the early twentieth-century Philippines. It has much to teach scholars about U. S. empire building, colonial medicine, race, and gender.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Colonial Pathologies is a path-breaking study of an aspect of late colonialism that is all too frequently neglected: imperial medicine. Anderson demonstrates how hygiene and sanitation became the hallmarks of a distinctly Americanised andlsquo;civilising processandrsquo; that attempted to impose foreign rule over an archipelago of subjects and protect those entrusted with its mission from the baneful effects of having to do so in a tropical setting.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Anderson has done an extraordinarily thorough job of research, and he skillfully employs the rich material he found regarding several key players. . . . Colonial Pathologies helps us understand just how complex and changing the reciprocal interactions between various imperial projectsandmdash;in this case, the American project in the Philippinesandmdash;and Western medical thinking really were.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Anderson's achievement . . . One of the finest and most finely nuanced accounts yet of colonial medicine in Asia (or, indeed, its sister continents), Colonial Pathologies provides an accessible narrative which students of European and American public health would read with profit.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Warwick Andersonandrsquo;s scholarship is well known for its intellectual rigor and its stimulating originality. . . . Without ignoring the particularities of the colonial history of the Philippines or of andlsquo;American wayandrsquo; of public health, Anderson offers above all, in my view, a fine reflection on the culture of biomedicalization, the questions of power and the negotiations that are part of the process, and the unexpected results that emerge, both locally and globally.andrdquo;
Synopsis
A study of the promotion of hygiene and bodily reform in the colonial Philippines.
Synopsis
A groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s.
About the Author
“Colonial Pathologies does the work that many colonial histories profess to do but rarely carry out: it provides us with a meticulous, dynamic, and grounded analysis of how political rationalities were honed and colonial and colonized subjectivities were formed through the changing medical perceptions and practices of U.S. imperial policy. Not least, it demonstrates how Philippines colonial public health regimes provided the template for subsequent healthcare in the Philippines, in the United States, and in international health services more broadly.”—Ann Laura Stoler, editor of Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History“An imaginative and well-informed study of what might be called the bodily dimension of imperial relationships in the Philippines. Warwick Anderson explores the subjective and multidimensional aspects of the formally humane and objective realm of tropical public health, illuminating the American colonial experience and foreshadowing ambiguities and paradoxes in what we have come to call global health.”—Charles E. Rosenberg, author of No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought“It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this book. Its account of hygiene as the means for establishing ‘biomedical citizenship’ in the Philippines under U.S. rule is carefully crafted and powerfully argued. Sympathetically deconstructing the assertiveness and delusions of white colonial medical practitioners beset by the specters of native bodily excess, Warwick Anderson shows how race and biology defined civic identities in the colony and the metropole alike. A path-breaking work on imperial medicine, it is certain to attract a wide readership.”—Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. American Military Faces West 13
2. The Military Basis of Colonial Public Health 45
3. andldquo;Only Man is Vileandrdquo; 74
4. Excremental Colonialism 104
5. The White Manandrsquo;s Psychic Burden 130
6. Disease and Citizenship 158
7. Late-Colonial Public Heath and Filipino andldquo;Mimicryandrdquo; 180
8. Malaria Between Race and Ecology 207
Conclusion 227
Abbreviations 235
Notes 237
Bibliography 299
Index 343