Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines

by Warwick Anderson

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 “civilizing” 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 Filipinos’ personal hygiene practices and social conduct. A vivid sense of a colonial culture characterized by an anxious and assertive white masculinity emerges from Anderson’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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, School, History Of Medicine, Health, Medicine

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colonial Pathologies examines ideas of colonial medicine in the Philippines to probe the changing discourses of environment, medicine, and race from the turn of the century through World War II. Preventing disease was a process that racializing and disciplining native bodies.

This book marks a change from ideas of tropic nature as capable of weakening the white body to seeing racialized native bodies as themselves a disease vector. This book deals with the concept of “medicalized citizenship” or “biomedical citizenship” whereby compliance with medicalized colonial regimes was interpreted as evidence of fitness for citizenship under a post-WWII development framework.

This book also situates the progressive era obsession with sanitation and regulating the bodies of the immigrant and poor populations in the U.S. as arising out of a particular colonial context.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colonialism was a mess.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a good examination of the idiom of science and medicine in the American-controlled Philippines. Personally, I would've liked to have seen a little less Foucault and a little more McNeill in this book; this book really has very little space for the role of the diseases and medical conditions themselves, choosing instead to focus almost exclusively on how they were interpreted.

I suspect that it owes something to David Arnold's Colonizing the Body, which I am currently reading and examines similar questions about British-controlled India. But Arnold's book seems to get at both meaning *and* medicine, better than Anderson's.

[Rachel Wang · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit disjointed and repetitive, although definitely informative and thought-provoking.

[Frances · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Chapter 3: "Only Man is Vile"