Weaving MAPS: Historiographical Perspectives on Writing Postcolonial Histories of the Modern Hospital

This paper explores how we can write about the postcolonial histories of the modern hospital. With the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), Manila, Philippines as a starting point, I locate the colonial hospital in the broader and often separate historiographies of the modern hospital and the postcolonial histories of science, technology, and medicine in Southeast Asia. Broadly, hospital histories focus more on organizational management and less on the socio-material entanglements that emerge within the hospital space. Historical studies explicitly centered on the modern hospital are almost exclusively written from the perspective of architectural histories. While the current literature presents valuable discourse on the interface of medical and architectural ideas on hospital design, these histories may present Eurocentric and Whiggish narratives, largely excluding histories of modern hospitals in colonies. However, emerging intersections between emotional and architectural histories of imperial infrastructures highlight the potential of material-affective approaches for advancing postcolonial studies (MAPS) of the modern hospital. The second historiographical stream traces the formation of increasingly critical and agential postcolonial histories of science, technology, and medicine in Southeast Asia. Critical science studies have generated compelling analyses of modern hospitals as biopolitical sites in the colonial period. Moreover, the colonial hospital persists as fertile ground for revealing autonomous histories and new relations and subjectivities in Southeast Asia's postcolonial reconfigurations. Critical historians of medicine and science in the region also urge more engagement between historical and ethnographic approaches. By weaving these historiographies, I argue that material-affective methods are vital to writing the postcolonial history of modern hospitals and propose a combined MAPS approach to potentially answer the question: how do we write the postcolonial history of colonial hospitals?