Session Name: Questionable practices: Debating medicine, health and morality in colonial contexts
1 - Betterment for whom? Infant mortality, Social hygiene and Eugenic thinking in Colonial Malaya
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
09:00 - 10:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract This paper will address the presence of eugenics thinking within colonial society in British Malaya in first half of the twentieth century. Malaya was developing into a medically-advanced part of the British empire with the establishment of a medical school in Singapore in 1905, the presence of an institute for medical research in Kuala Lumpur, and participation in international health networks. Locally, there were efforts aimed at improving the health of the population such as campaigns to reduce infant mortality and social hygiene initiatives. One of these initiatives was the organization of “baby shows” where elite members of government and in the medical hierarchy were judges of babies who entered a competition under one of several racial categories. Such baby shows prompt further questions about how European and Asian medical elites saw their role as medical practitioners in relation to ideas in circulation about social hygiene and group health. The paper asks how colonial authorities saw “population betterment” in the context of colonial Malaya: who exactly were seen as targets of improvement, why, and what larger aims fueled these initiatives?
.png)