Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the constitution of an international discourse of public health in the 1930s, a discourse that wove previously fragmented experiments in medicine and sanitation across Asia into a more unified set of ideas and practices. While colonial public health efforts remained fragmented and touched a very small proportion of Asia’s populations, the language of rural public health brought together a somewhat unlikely range of visions on the fringes of colonial policy. Rural hygiene came to unite a range of aspirations, from Mahatma Gandhi’s quest for bodily and hygienic reform, to the attempts of a Rockefeller Foundation official to transform the health of a village in the Dutch East Indies.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
H. Tinker, The Foundations of Local Self-Government in India, Pakistan and Burma (London: Pall Mall Press, 1954), p. 287.
K.S. Ray (ed.), The Problems of the Medical Profession in India (Calcutta: All-India Medical Association, 1929), p. 5; parts of the same passage are cited in Jeffery, The Politics ofHealth in India, p. 177.
I. Klein, ‘Population growth and mortality in British India, Part II: The demographic revolution’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 27, 1 (1990), 33–63.
S. Guha, Health and Population in South Asia: From the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Hurst & Co., 2001), p. 86.
Cf. J. & J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 volumes (Chicago, 1991, 1997).
M. Lal, ‘The Ignorance of Women is the House of Illness’: Gender, Nationalism and Health Reform in Colonial North India’, in M. Sutphen and B. Andrews (eds), Medicine and Colonial Identity (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 14–40.
R. Shlomowitz and L. Brennan, ‘Mortality and Indian labour in Malaya, 1877–1933’, IESHR, 29 (1992), 57–75.
Andrew Hardy, ‘One Hundred Years of Malaria Control in Vietnam: a regional retrospective’, Parts 1& 2, Mekong Malaria Forum, 5 (Jan 2000), and 6 (April 2000).
On the history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division, see J. Farley, To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913–1951) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
M. Grmek, ‘Life and Achievements of Andrija Stampar, Fighter for the Promotion of Public Health’, in Grmek (ed.), Serving the Cause ofPublic Health: Selected Papers of Andrija Stampar (Zagreb: Andrija Stampar School of Public Health, 1966), pp. 13–51; Zylberman, ‘Fewer Parallels than Antitheses’.
A. Stampar, ‘Health and Social Conditions in China’, Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organization of the League of Nations, 5 (1936), 1090–126.
M. Grmek, ‘The Life and Achievements of Andrija Stampar, Fighter for the Promotion of Public Health’, in Serving the Cause of Public Health, pp. 13–51, p. 39.
League of Nations, Report of the Health Organization for the Period, October 1932 to December 1933 (Geneva, 1934); E. Burnet, ‘General Principles Governing the Prevention of Tuberculosis’, Quarterly Bulletin of the Health Organization, 1 (1932), pp. 489–663.
J. Boyd Orr, and J.L. Gilks, Studies in Nutrition: The Physique and Health of Two African Tribes (London, 1931).
David Arnold, ‘The “Discovery” of Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 31, 1 (1994), 1–27.
M. Ricklefs, A History of Modem Indonesia Since c. 1200 (Basingstake: Palgrave, 2001), p. 227.
P. Boomgaard, ‘The Welfare Services in Indonesia, 1900–1942’, Itinerario, (1986), 57–82; Boomgaard, citing this evidence, reached a rather more optimistic conclusion about the expanse of colonial health services. See also D.A. Low, ‘Counterpart Experiences: Indian and Indonesian Nationalisms, 1920s-1950s’, Itinerario, 1 (1986), 117–44.
Cf. M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76 (trans. David Macey, Penguin, 2003), lecture of 17 March 1976.
M. Ricklefs, History of Modern Indonesia Since c. 1200 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), chapter 16.
For a helpful exegesis on this concept, see Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999), especially pp. 1–14.
J.L. Hydrick, Intensive Rural Hygiene Work and Public Health Education of the Public Health Service of Netherlands India (Batavia-Centrum, Java, January 1937), pp. i-ii.
M.K. Gandhi, ‘A Talk to Village Workers’, extract from a talk given on 22 October 1935, in M.K. Gandhi, Diet and Diet Reform (Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1949), pp. 31–3.
See, inter alia, ‘Dietetic Changes’, Harijan, 27/7/1935, in Diet and Diet Reform, pp. 86–7; ‘Minimum Diet’, Harijan, 31/8/1935, in Diet and Diet Reform, p. 30; ‘Polished v. Unpolished’, Harijan, 26/10/1934, in Diet and Diet Reform, pp. 44–6. The work to which Gandhi referred appears to be E.V. McCollum, The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition: The Use of Food for the Preservation of Vitality and Health (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
M.K. Gandhi, ‘Implications of Constructive Programme’ [1940], Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 72 (Delhi: Government of India, Publications Division, 1958–78) p. 380.
See, for example, W. Anderson, ‘Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience’, Social Studies of Science 32, 5–6 (2002), 643–57.
W.R. Aykroyd, B.G. Krishnan, R. Passmore and A.R. Sundararajan (Coonoor Nutrition Research Laboratory), Indian Medical Research Memoirs, No. 32, The Rice Problem in India (January 1940), IOR, V/25/850/92, p. 64.
C.J. Baker, ‘Economic Reorganization and the Slump in South and Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23, 3 (1981), 325–39.
League of Nations, Intergovernmental Conference of Far-Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene: Report by the Preparatory Committee (Geneva, 1937) [III. Health. 1937.1II.3].
J. Mackie, Bandung 1955: Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005), pp. 24–5; on Indies modernism, see Mrázek, Engineers.
See, for example, League of Nations, Malaria Commission: Report on its Tour of Investigation in Certain European Countries in 1924 (Geneva, 1925), C.H. 273.
E. Blunt (ed.), Social Service in India: An Introduction to Some Social and Economic Problems of the Indian People (London: HMSO, 1939), pp. 382–3; Central Co-operative Anti-Malaria Society, Annual Reports (Calcutta, 1927–43).
See League of Nations, Intergovernmental Conference of Far-Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, Preparatory Papers: National Reports: Report of the Netherlands Indies (Geneva, 1937), [III.Health.1937.III.15]; and A.P. den Hartog, ‘Towards Improving Public Nutrition: Nutritional Policy in Indonesia Before Independence’, in G.M. van Heteren, A. de Knechtvan Eekelen, M.J.D. Poulissen (eds), Dutch Medicine in the Malay Archipelago, 1816–1942 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 105–18.
M. Jones, ‘Infant and Maternal Health Services in Ceylon, 1900–1948: Imperialism or Welfare?’ Social History of Medicine, 15, 2 (2002), 263–89. For a critique of Jones’ overly sanguine assumptions about the beneficence of colonial public health, see Maarten Bode’s review in Wellcome History, 30 (2005), p. 20.
Cited in John Farley, Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 176.
Baker, An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamilnad Countryside, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), p. 519.
D.A. Washbrook, ‘The Rhetoric of Democracy and Development in Late Colonial India’, in S. Bose and A. Jalal (eds), Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 36–49.
National Planning Committee, Population: Report of the Sub-Committee (Chair: Dr Radhakamal Mukherjee) K.T. Shah ed., Vohra & Co., 1947, p. 8. Although the proceedings of the NPC were published in edited form after the war, the discussions took place between 1938 and 1940.
See Sarah Hodges, Contraception’s Voluntary Empire (forthcoming, Ashgate).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale: Yale University Press, 1998).
Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 148.
Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Ming-Cheng M. Lo, Doctors Within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (Berkeley & LA, UC Press, 2002).
Following, here, James Vernon, ‘The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-politics of the School Meal in Britain’, American Historical Review, 110, 3 (2005), 693–725.
Copyright information
© 2006 Sunil S. Amrith
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Amrith, S.S. (2006). Depression and the Internationalization of Public Health. In: Decolonizing International Health. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627369_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627369_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54047-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62736-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)