Interest in the medical history of Cold War Southeast Asia has grown slowly over the past decade.The prevention of epidemic diseases and improvement of public health emerged as central concerns during the processes of decolonization and nation building in postwar Asia, prompting a broad range of scholarly inquiries into the intersection of health, politics, and inter national relations.Much of this literature evaded a focus on Southeast Asia as a region.Bu Liping and Yip Ka-che's Public Health and National Reconstruction in Post-War Asia (2015), for exam ple, focused primarily on China and India and included only two chapters on Southeast Asia.These two chapters examined internal politics and cultural/religious factors in the shaping of health policies, an approach that complements the volume under review.More recently, Vivek Neelakantan's The Geopolitics of Health in South and Southeast Asia (2023) brought together a collection of chapters on Asia-specific approaches to global health histories with a focus on Cold War geopolitics, international aid organizations, and COVID-19, among other topics, emphasiz ing the roles and strategies of regional organizations such as SAARC, ASEAN, and SEARO.But here again, the emphasis was divided between South and Southeast Asian countries, favoring the former.Given Southeast Asia's unique regional challenges and experiences during the Cold War, questions remained as to how far the Southeast Asian medical experience during the period could be generalized as part of something else.Fighting for Health, edited by C. Michele Thompson, Kathryn Sweet, and Michitake Aso, builds on the earlier historiography, but its key strength lies in its focus on local medical and health-care developments and experiences, highlighting the broader social impacts of medicine and the Cold War.In the volume's eight chapters, drawn from presentations at History of Medicine in Southeast Asia conferences, the contributors aim to examine the intertwined nature of medicine and politics in Cold War Southeast Asia.Focusing on six Southeast Asian
Atsuko Naono (Thu,) studied this question.