This roundtable brings together a group of scholars to discuss the possibilities for future directions in the history of medicine from the vantage of Southeast Asia. As a place of tremendous cultural and ecological diversity, shaped by the collision of different colonizing and decolonizing projects, Southeast Asia focuses our attention on those cross-cultural circulations of knowledge and transnational networks of expertise that shaped the everyday experiences of medicine, health and caregiving across the region and beyond. Indeed, we argue that this region, which remains "peripheral" to scholarship on the history of medicine, was never just "out there" but was instead a constitutive feature of the global development of medicine and public health. The four panelists will offer vignettes from their current projects. Anh Le (Assistant Professor, Muhlenberg College) will speak about how connections across diasporic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia reshaped the meaning and practice of traditional Chinese medicine in colonial Vietnam. Thuy Linh Nguyen (Associate Professor, Mount Saint Mary College) will discuss the health impacts of the colonial mining industry amidst the intensification of colonial capitalism and ecological degradation in Vietnam’s northern borderlands with China. Claire Edington (Associate Professor, University of California - San Diego) will discuss how we might use archival sources to recover the experiences of drug users and their families in Vietnam across the twentieth century. Michitake Aso (University at Albany - SUNY) will talk about the public health response to Agent Orange during and after the Vietnam War as a way to reframe our understanding of the relationship of medical science and postwar politics. This discussion will showcase how the history of medicine in Southeast Asia offers valuable conceptual frames for widening our field of vision, both within HOM and Southeast Asian Studies.
Chair email:
[email protected]Learning Outcomes- To deepen understanding of the importance of Southeast Asia to the global history of medicine and public health
- To think with Southeast Asia as a generative site for exploring new themes and methodologies in the history of medicine
- To reflect more generally on the relationship between area studies and the history of medicine, and to chart out future steps for collaboration across fields.
