2 - Beri-beri and Prison Experiments in Colonial Indonesia

My contribution to the ICAS conference will focus on moral choices and their consequences in colonial medicine. Central in this paper are experiments on soldiers and prison inmates in the Dutch East Indies, to further medical knowledge about beri-beri, a disease we now know is caused by vitamin B1 deficiency.

The story of how Dutch scientists Christiaan Eijkman and Adolphe Vorderman investigated the disease is well known: Eijkman realized that chickens who were fed polished rice developed a disease that was similar to beriberi, and Vorderman was able to confirm that prison inmates too suffered from beri-beri if they consumed polished rice. Their findings, however, are but one chapter in a longer history of beri-beri experiments on humans, done mostly on inmates of prisons or mental asylums and soldiers.
Based on research in medical journals but also on colonial archives, this paper looks at those experiments in the Dutch East Indies in which these research subjects each received different diets. Although this kind of medical experiment was generally more benign than other experiments, such as those with cholera vaccination, doctors (and prison directors etc) made moral choices about the lives of others. This paper traces these choices and the arguments that they used against the backdrop of patients’ compliance or resistance. This will be one case-study in a larger history of ethical practices in human subject research in colonial Southeast Asia.