An overlooked history of Southeast Asia's varied healthcare regimes during the Cold War. For far too long, Southeast Asia has been treated as a static backdrop for the exploits and discoveries of Western biomedical doctors. Yet, Southeast Asians have been vital to the significant developments in the prevention and treatment of diseases that have taken place in the region and beyond. Many of the institutions and people that shaped subsequent responses to outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics first began their work in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The diversity of approaches to health and medicine during that era also reminds us of the possibilities, and limits, of human intervention in the face of political, social, economic, and microbial realities. The people and places of Southeast Asia have provided clinical trials for different health regimes. Fighting for Health highlights new perspectives and methods that have evolved from research presented at regional conferences, including the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMSEA) series. These insights serve to challenge dominant models of the medical humanities.
Michele Thompson holds an MA in East Asian History and a PhD in Southeast Asian History. Her research and publications focus on the History of Medicine and the Environment of Southeast Asia. Kathryn Sweet is a social historian of Laos whose research has focused on health, development and cultural issues of the twentieth century. Michitake Aso is a global environmental historian whose research has focused on Vietnamese and French agriculture, medicine, and health in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
List of Tables List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1: Health, Agriculture and Animism in the 'Development' of Portuguese Timor, 1945- 1975 Chapter 2: Tool of Domination and Act of Benevolence: Medicine and Healthcare during the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960 Chapter 3: Health Sector Contestation in Cold War Laos, 1950-1975 Chapter 4: More Eastern than Traditional: The Making of ?ong y in the Republic of Vietnam during the Cold War Chapter 5: Building a "socialist health system": Soviet assistance in malaria control in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the Cold War Chapter 6: Mobilising Applied Medical Knowledge for Indonesia: Soekarnoist Science and Asian-African Solidarity, 1950s Chapter 7: The Cholera Pandemic, Chinese Diaspora, and the Cold War Politics in Southeast Asia and China during the 1960s Chapter 8: Managing Wartime Conditions: South Korean Developmental Ambitions, Public Health, and Emerging Forms of Overseas Medical Outreach, 1964-1973 Glossary Bibliography Contributors Index
"This is a wide-ranging, compelling, and skillfully edited collection at the cutting edge of new, transnational approaches to health in Southeast Asia. The chapters here show how central health has been to nation-building in Southeast Asia - and how crucial Southeast Asia has been to the politics of global health." - Sunil Amrith, Yale University "Fighting for Health does much more than offer the first history of medicine in Cold War Southeast Asia. As demonstrated by a fine collection of essays, the region provided a "clinical trial for a plurality of health regimes" that not only built on shortages and violence but on South-South medical solidarities and inter-Asia scientific networks. Health regimes we need to learn from to rethink global health." - Laurence Monnais, Universite de Montreal, Canada "With its diversity of peoples, varied ecologies, multiple colonial regimes and nation-states, and heterogeneous health practices, Southeast Asia constitutes a crucial site for comparative history of medicine. In our pandemic era, Fighting for Health thus offers fresh insight into the historical complexities of disease emergence and outbreak endings. Everyone interested in health and disease in our fraught times has much to learn from these compelling stories." - Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney (author of Colonial Pathologies).
