Author: Sokhieng Au ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDFDuring the first half of the twentieth century, representatives of the French colonial health services actively strove to expand the practice of Western medicine in the frontier colony of Cambodia. But as the French physicians ventured beyond their colonial enclaves, they found themselves negotiating with the plurality of Cambodian cultural practices relating to health and disease. These negotiations were marked by some success, a great deal of misunderstanding, and much failure.
Bringing together colorful historical vignettes, social and anthropological theory, and quantitative analyses, Mixed Medicines examines these interactions between the Khmer, Cham, and Vietnamese of Cambodia and the French, documenting the differences in their understandings of medicine and revealing the unexpected transformations that occurred during this period—for both the French and the indigenous population.
- File Size: 2414 KB
- Print Length: 275 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0226031640
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press; 1 edition (July 24, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0097E4OOI
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,305,735 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Mixed Medicines: Health and Culture in French Colonial Cambodia PDF
The best reason to read this book is to establish a benchmark for cultural misunderstanding in public health. France's colonization of Cambodia from 1863 to 1953 overlaps with the scientific flowering of biomedicine. The first French physicians to arrive in Cambodia possessed a Western medical tradition that was not objectively superior to indigenous traditions of Southeast Asia.By DBishai
Imperialist approaches to public health are seldom impeded by humility. As Au's book points out the French wrought havoc introducing poorly constructed cholera vaccines and plague laboratories to the Cambodian people. Au is able to recapture some of the arrogance of the imperialist medical corps, and soft pedals the irony of the terrible violations of the Hippocratic oath that ensued from the conceit that Western medical practices of that era were superior to anything indigenous.
This is a great contribution to the history of public health. We have very few in depth descriptions of how the sanitary revolution spread to European colonies. Given that current international public health practitioners continue to face the same issues as the French Medical Corps the book has continued relevance to the field of public health. The advantage of Au's treatment is that the time and place "seems" so far removed from the present that readers may feel more free to be critical of the Western do-gooders. Once that critical stance is achieved it is an easy step to see that plus 硠change, plus c'est la mꭥ chose.
No comments:
Post a Comment