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

The US occupation of the Philippines, which began with the Spanish–American War of 1898, gave rise to one of the most intensive episodes of medical and sanitary intervention in the history of modern Asia. A story of medicalisation, racialisation and partial retreat that took many decades to unfold in British, French and Dutch colonies was compressed in the Philippines into barely 30 years, and implemented with more confident rigour than most colonial powers could muster. The medical history of the Philippines under American rule has attracted scholarly attention before, notably in Ken De Bevoise's 1995 study, Agents of the Apocalypse . Some of the same epidemiological terrain is inevitably traversed in Warwick Anderson's latest book. But Colonial Pathologies goes well beyond its predecessors in documenting and contextualising the Americans' first medical incursion into tropical south-east Asia. It does much more than recount the means by which the American administration tackled urgent issues of sanitary deprivation and epidemic insurgency. The author presents readers with one of the most systematic (but equally one of the most intellectually challenging) accounts yet given of how a colonial regime set about its self-appointed medical task and was itself affected by the process.