Germanophone Physicians in the Dutch East Indies: Transimperial Histories of Medicine between Europe and Colonized Indonesia, c. 1873-1920s

Abstract

Germanophone Physicians in the Dutch East Indies is the first comprehensive study to examine the case of physicians from the German-speaking parts of the German States and Empire, Switzerland, and Habsburg Austria employed with the Dutch East Indies’ military and civil health services from 1873 to the 1920s. By focusing on medical professionals from regions with no, late, or short-lived colonial overseas possessions of their own in ‘foreign’ imperial services, the study pursues three interrelated aims. First, this thesis is situated within a large and growing body of research that investigates the history of empire from a transimperial perspective, attempting to unite seemingly distinct national and imperial settings within ‘the same analytical field’. On the one hand, by highlighting the various contributions of Swiss and Austrian physicians to Dutch colonial medicine and revealing how medical discourse in Switzerland and the Habsburg Empire was shaped by medical professionals ‘in the colonial field’, this study further elucidates the colonial entanglements of European regions that did not possess their own ‘formal’ colonial empires. On the other hand, by tracing the trajectories of physicians from the German States and Empire in Dutch imperial services before, during, and after the establishment of the German Colonial Empire, it further expands the spatial and temporal framework of conventional Dutch and German colonial history. Second, this study contributes to a bourgeoning strand of historiography exploring the role of empire in the self-perception and -fashioning of European, middle-class men. A key objective is to shed light on the ways in which joining ‘foreign’ imperial services could serve as a valuable means for physicians striving for upward social mobility, financial security, or the embodiment of hegemonic masculinity ideals. As various examples analyzed in the framework of this study demonstrate, Germanophone physicians serving the Dutch colonial health care institutions in Southeast Asia effectively leveraged the symbolic capital acquired through their colonial service to claim scientific authority in highly topical medical subfields of the late 19th century such as bacteriology or tropical medicine, or to launch a medical research career in Europe – and beyond. Others chose to disseminate their purported Far Eastern adventures through published memoires or letters to their relatives ‘at home’, portraying themselves and adventurous, brave, and widely traveled men embodying ideals of imperial masculinity. Third, the present thesis adds to recent approaches to the history of colonial medicine that question portrayals of the European medical sciences as an omnipotent ‘tool of empire’. For this purpose, it chooses to focus on ‘men on the spot’, i.e. medical practitioners employed with the colonial military and civil hospitals, to illuminate the various ways in which medical knowledge was shaped and contested in colonial contexts. This focus on medical practices ‘in the field’ rather than theories reveals that European physicians, when confronted with resistance from their patients, with the competition posed by indigenous medical treatments, or with previously unknown diseases and environmental conditions, struggled to claim a hegemonic position in the complex social formation in the Dutch East Indies. Moreover, it points to the ways in which late 19th century medical disciplines such as bacteriology or tropical medicine, that portrayed itself as ‘objective’ and ‘universal’, were deeply shaped by the interests of colonial institutions as well as colonial ideology, and racialized notions of the human body and its predisposition to disease continued to shape European medicine in the 20th century. The first chapter expands on the transimperial labor markets for ‘foreign’ medical experts from Germanophone Europe in the 19th century. It demonstrates how the Dutch Colonial Army, holding a monopoly on the Dutch East Indies’ health care system, emerged as the most important employer for medically educated men from Germanophone Europe. The second chapter zooms in on the accounts of Germanophone physicians stationed in Aceh in northwestern Sumatra in the late 19th century. By closely analyzing their testimonies from an intersectional perspective, the chapter situates these ‘foreign’, middle-class, medically educated men in Dutch imperial services in the complex ‘imperial social formation’. The third chapter focusses on the ways in which Germanophone medical officers claimed scientific authority in late 19th century bacteriological discourse by pointing to their first-hand experience with diseases and patients in the tropics. The chapter highlights the deep contestedness and transimperial dissemination of colonial medical knowledge as much as it points to the significance of colonial contexts and ideology in the making of the ‘modern’ European medical sciences. The last chapter finally shifts the attention to German and Swiss physicians employed in the civil plantation hospitals in Sumatra’s ‘plantation belt’. The chapter points to the various biopolitical implications of ‘plantation hygiene’ and demonstrates how physicians capitalized on their experiences in Sumatra to forge scientific careers in Europe and beyond.