IKMAS Seminar Series No.15/2016
THE INSTITUTE OF MALAYSIAN AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (IKMAS) UNIVERSITI KEBANGSAAN MALAYSIA cordially invites you to:
IKMAS Seminar Series No.15/2016
Title: Placing Chinese Fevers
Date: Wednesday, 21st September 2016
Time: 2:30pm – 4:30pm
Venue: IKMAS Seminar Room, Level 1, IKMAS Building, 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia
Speaker: Mr Maurits Meerwijk, Department of History, University of Hong Kong
SYNOPSIS
In this paper, I explore how febrile diseases were understood by Western physicians and scientists working in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on archives from Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports, I examine prevalent assumptions about ‘fevers’ – their nature, dissemination, and treatment. Although this period is often taken to mark a ‘breakthrough’ in scientific knowledge and practice (the ‘laboratory revolution’), in the paper I show how ‘fevers’ were, in fact, understood as heterogeneous phenomena that assumed different identities in the locales where they were found. My aim is to open up a space to study the history of these variegated diseases and, in so doing, to move away from historical and current accounts that persist in lumping these febrile diseases together as being ‘mostly malaria’.
Chinese fevers, I argue, occupied a position between familiar European conditions and the obscure diseases of ‘warm climates’. Significantly, the emerging discipline of modern tropical medicine, underpinned by bacteriology and parasitology, received input and impetus from physicians, such as Patrick Manson, who had practiced all but exclusively in China. Assumptions and ideas about the Chinese disease landscape, and the practice of medical science in China, thus played a critical role in the formation of the biomedical sciences and in the constitution of ‘modern’ disease identities.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Mr Maurits Meerwijk is a doctoral candidate at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the history of dengue fever in modern Asia. His thesis seeks to cast light on the past of a neglected tropical disease, and examines the conundrum of why some diseases are more ‘visible’ than others. Maurits is deeply interested in the historical interplay (both material and discursive) of diseases and environments, and the development of modern medical science in the non-West. He holds a BA in History from the University of Utrecht and an MA in Modern History from the University of Warwick.
We look forward to your participation in this seminar. Confirmation of your attendance is greatly appreciated. For further information please call 8921- 4169 or 8921-5855.