Colonial Pathologies

“Colonial Pathologies does the work that many colonial histories profess to do but rarely carry out: it provides us with a meticulous, dynamic, and grounded analysis of how political rationalities were honed and colonial and colonized subjectivities were formed through the changing medical perceptions and practices of U.S. imperial policy. Not least, it demonstrates how Philippines colonial public health regimes provided the template for subsequent healthcare in the Philippines, in the United States, and in international health services more broadly.”–Ann Laura Stoler, editor of Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History “An imaginative and well-informed study of what might be called the bodily dimension of imperial relationships in the Philippines. Warwick Anderson explores the subjective and multidimensional aspects of the formally humane and objective realm of tropical public health, illuminating the American colonial experience and foreshadowing ambiguities and paradoxes in what we have come to call global health.”–Charles E. Rosenberg, author of No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought “It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this book. Its account of hygiene as the means for establishing ‘biomedical citizenship’ in the Philippines under U.S. rule is carefully crafted and powerfully argued. Sympathetically deconstructing the assertiveness and delusions of white colonial medical practitioners beset by the specters of native bodily excess, Warwick Anderson shows how race and biology defined civic identities in the colony and the metropole alike. A path-breaking work on imperial medicine, it is certain to attract a wide readership.”–Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines “ … this fascinating and ambitious book is of broad appeal, and will intrigue and challenge readers interested in the history of the Philippines and American colonial expansion, as well as the history of medicine, ‘race’, masculinity, confinement, and discipline.”–IIAS Newsletter #45 Autumn 2007

Warwick Anderson teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics; Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health; and Professor of the History of Science, Science and Technology Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies. He is the author of The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, also published by Duke University Press.