Histories of colonial medical institutions are often heavily reliant upon government reports. My own work on the Rangoon Lunatic Asylum in the nineteenth century uses them extensively to tease out the colonial state’s priorities in treating “insanity”. But in conducting this analysis, I did not conceptualize the audience for the reports beyond the ranks of…
Tag: Colonial Medicine
Exploding Mosquito Larvae and Jumping Lab Rats
I’m often tempted, when researching the history of science, to focus on experiments that seem, today, to have been odd or unusual. This is not a helpful approach. It can belittle the scientific understandings of the past and reinforce the simplistic story that ideas inexorably improve over time. Despite this, recently I found myself giving…
Where’s the Cow in the Condensed Milk?
I’ve recently been doing some research into milk production in colonial Burma and going through the pages of the anti-colonial daily newspaper Thuriya for the interwar years. Despite trying to encourage domestic production of commodities through articulating a form of economic nationalism, the paper was mostly full of adverts for foreign products—including both powdered and…
Animals in the Asylum
Last week I presented a paper as part of a panel on the history of lunatic asylums at the European Association of Southeast Asian Studies’ annual conference, hosted by the University of Vienna. It was the first time that I had returned to the subject of colonial psychiatry since I completed the research for my…
The Imperial Science of Hypnotic Adverts
Whilst I was doing some research in colonial-era magazines, I stumbled across this 1930s advert in to: te’ yei: (progress) magazine for a book promising to teach people the skill of hypnotism. Costing just three rupees, the seller generously offered to refund any purchaser who found that they could not ‘master the science’. Learning hypnotism—or,…
Colonial Canicide, Cruel to be Kind?
One of the ways in which British colonizers sought to distinguish themselves from the colonized populations that they ruled over, and to justify that rule, was through claiming that they treated animals more humanely than the ‘natives’. In Burma this claim was also made, but it was not always straight-forward. Buddhism was viewed by imperial…
Medical and Imperial Utopias
When I was last in Yangon I bought a copy of Colonel M. L. Treston’s Health Notes Medical and Sanitary. It was printed by the Government of Burma and was intended to advise future British officials. Although not dated, since Treston is described as the Inspector-General of Civil Hospitals, a post that he took up…
Sun, Skin and Colonial Sensibilities
July has been a busy month. I spent the first week at two conferences at which I gave two entirely different papers. The first was on animals in colonial Burma. The second was on the history of sunstroke. But as different as these two topics may appear, there is some overlap. In the late-nineteenth century…
Plague and Photography in Colonial Burma
I recently stumbled across some fascinating photographs of colonial measures taken to arrest the spread of bubonic plague in Mandalay in 1906 through the online archive of medical history images available through the Wellcome Trust, London. These photographs show Burmese residents apparently willingly submitting themselves to British medicine. In the top photo a group are…
Colonizing Animals 