Lecture | Global Histories of Knowledge Seminar
The Market of Health, Vigor and Beauty in the Dutch East indies: The Role of Irregular Physicians and Pharmacies
- Date
- Friday 22 November 2024
- Time
- Series
- Global Histories of Knowledge 2024 - 2025
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.47
Abstract
Most historians of medicine interested in the Dutch East Indies have focused on the role of two allegedly incompatible medical traditions: western and traditional medicine. They thereby overlook various other medical traditions that were present as well as the way medical traditions are selectively combined and transformed by healers, carers, and sick individuals. The medical marketplace in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia offered a wide range of suppliers who sold medications, cures, and approaches from multiple local and international sources. This can be seen most clearly by analysing the products offered by hat pharmacists and the magazines they published to advertise their goods. When analysing medicine and healing from the perspective of everyday people, the pills, potions, and elixirs offered by pharmacies have played a major and thus overlooked role.
Speaker
Hans Pols is Professor at the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is interested in the history of colonial medicine in the Dutch East Indies and the transformations medical research and practice underwent after Indonesia’s independence. Over the past ten years, he became interested in mental health in Indonesia today and in the near future. He has also conducted research on the history of Australian community mental health.