Making Health Public: English Language Newspapers and the Medical Sciences in Colonial Malaya (1840s–1941)

Abstract

The print and broadcast media are traditionally vital vehicles for both the transmission of information and framing of discussion on health, medicine, and diseases. However, their roles have been largely peripheral in medical historiography. In this respect, this paper explores the position of English language newspapers in colonial Malaya in identifying and disseminating epidemiological data as well as commentaries on public health issues and policies. These discussions provided a crucial platform in linking public health discourses to a more literate and influential lay public and adding to broader debates on the governance of the colony. Collectively, the articles and editorials of the print media in British Malaya were not only indicative of the extent of involvement of colonial civil society in public health. Their narratives also reflected underlying tensions between state and society in addition to sociocultural anxieties over the fluid labor and capital flows of the colonial political economy.Keywords British Malaya . Newspapers . Colonial science and medicine . Health communications So far as we are concerned, we shall be delighted to abandon drains, water supply, plague quarantine and tuberculosis and turn to high politics and the higher criticism as soon as there is some indication that the proper authorities are moving in the matter and that discussion has given way to practical work. Until then: we proposed to discuss sanitation ad nauseam.

Re-orienting STS: Emergent Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Southeast Asia

“…In this essay, Pols reveals the contested translations of therapeutic practice, the gendered and racialized assessments of medical credibility or expertise, and the changing patterns of circulation of knowledge during the colonial period-all of which have parallels, of course, in our own times. Liew (2009) similarly is concerned with the mediators of colonial medical knowledge, in this case, the English language newspapers of Malaya. His study of the construction of what is fundamentally a biopolitical platform adds considerably to our understanding of the creation of a scientized subjectivity or governmentality during the colonial period.…”