Questionable practices: Debating medicine, health and morality in colonial contexts

Panel Convenor(s)

• SM

  Sandra Manickam

  Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands

Panel Chair(s)

• FS

  Fenneke Sijsling

  Leiden University, Netherlands

Presenter(s)

• SM

  Sandra Manickam

  Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
• FS

  Fenneke Sijsling

  Leiden University, Netherlands
• GJ

  Gani A. Jaelani

  Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia

This panel focuses on the history of medicine of Southeast Asia and its questionable and debatable practices: colonial doctors in Southeast Asia opened cadavers, did experiments on prisoners and judged babies in baby-shows. Each of these practices forces us to think about moral choices in medicine and the experience of patients in these practices. And while historians have paid attention to medicine as a tool of Empire and also, increasingly, to medical pluralism in the colonial world, there is little attention for (bio)ethics and overlapping or conflicting value regimes.

In this panel, we discuss the moral world of doctors at the time, and look at how they weighed the risks and benefits of scientific procedures and how they valued individual lives, racial groups and scientific progress. Central questions are: What social, religious or humanitarian concerns or professional codes influenced the moral ideas of doctors? Which greater good was being foregrounded, and for whom, and which groups’ interests were deemed less important? Which platforms were used by participants to debate these ideas? Did patients and local participants play a role in shaping these debates?

The case studies in this panel involve medical experimentation conducted by Dutch physicians in the Netherlands East Indies, British colonial administrators’ and Malayan doctors’ participating in social hygiene movements, and a Sumatran doctor's consideration of the ethics of medical research using cadavers. Questions of ethics and morality are present in all of these studies, as well as the participation of various medical actors, European and Asian, local and foreign.

Presentations:

• 09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)

  Betterment for whom? Infant mortality, Social hygiene and Eugenic thinking in Colonial Malaya
  

  Presenter: Sandra Manickam – Erasmus University Rotterdam
• 09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)

  Beri-beri and Prison Experiments in Colonial Indonesia
  

  Presenter: Fenneke Sijsling – Leiden University
• 09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)

  The Body of the Dead as an Object of Scientific and Religious Debate: Ahmad Ramali and the Splenic Puncture in late colonial Indonesia
  

  Presenter: Gani A. Jaelani – Universitas Padjadjaran