2E Chua I
Panel Title:
Disease, Policy and Responses in the Philippines, 16th to the 20th Centuries I
Panel Organizer: Karl Ian Uy Cheng CHUA (Ateneo de Manila University)
Chair: TBA
1) Patricia Ysabel Wong (MA Candidate, Ateneo de Manila University)
"The Child Must Learn To Be Clean": The Gendering of Hygiene and Sanitation Education in Manila, 1900-1920
2) Michael D. Pante (Ph.D Candidate, Ateneo de Manila University)
Convergence and contradiction in the policies of Manila’s Department of Transportation and Sanitation
3) Arnel E. Joven (Ph.D, University of Asia and the Pacific)
IMPERIAL MEDICINE AND INDIGENOUS ADAPTATION: PUBLIC HEALTH CAMPAIGNS AND DISEASE CONTROL IN THE PHILIPPINES DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION PERIOD
Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua received his Master in Japanese Studies from the National University of Singapore writing a thesis on komik strips during the Japanese Occupation period of the Philippines. He received his Doctorate in Social Sciences from Hitotsubashi University with a dissertation on representations of foreigners in Japanese children's magazines from 1930 - 1950. He is currently an Assistant Professor of the Department of History and Japanese Studies Program of the Ateneo de Manila University.
Patricia Ysabel Wong is a part-time lecturer at the Department of History at the Ateneo de Manila Univerity. She is currently an M.A. Candidate at the same university, and has been involved in projects ranging from research, to teaching, and translation. Women, hygiene, sanitation, disease, and food during the American colonial period in the Philippines number among her research interests, and are fields that she wishes to specialize in.
Michael D. Pante is an instructor at the Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines, where he teaches undergraduate courses on Philippine history. He finished his MA History from the same university and is currently pursuing a PhD Philippine Studies at the University of the Philippines. He is also the assistant editor of the journal Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints.
Arnel E. Joven is Assistant Professor in the History Department of the University of Asia and the Pacific. He has recently finished his doctorate in History from the University of the Philippines, specialising in the history of medicine and health care in the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation Period. Since 2010, he has presented relevant papers on the health during the occupation period, in various international conferences. He is also specialising in medical anthropology focusing on health phenomenology and political economy. He is currently undertaking a research project on health perceptions in urban Japan.
Disease, Policy and Responses in the Philippines, 16th to the 20th Centuries
The Philippines has a long colonial history, having been occupied by three colonial powers for nearly 400 years, beginning in the sixteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. The different and competing influences that were brought about by colonialism offer a unique perspective for the study of the history of medicine.
This is a proposal for two panels, both of which aim to show the diverse influence of these colonizers (European, American, and Asian) and the particular responses of the Filipinos not only to imperial and colonial medicine and medical policy but also to their own medical tradition during the periods under consideration. The first panel consists of papers that deal with complexities of American imperial policies at the turn of the twentieth century to the early 1900s and the Japanese towards the end of the first half of the twentieth century. The second panel comprises papers that explore the reactions, responses, and negotiations to these policies not only from Filipinos but also from the colonizers themselves. Both panels present important but largely obscure(d) insights into the landscape of Philippine colonial medical and public health history from the colonial period to the period of independence.
Panel 1:
"The Child Must Learn To Be Clean": The Gendering of Hygiene and Sanitation Education in Manila, 1900-1920
Patricia Ysabel Wong, MA Candidate
Ateneo de Manila University
The arrival en masse of the American colonizers in 1899 was a pivotal event in the landscape of Philippine history, ushering in a period of unprecedented change in a relatively short period of time. Operating on the twin doctrines of benevolent assimilation and the white man's burden, the Americans greatly transformed the landscape of Philippine society, from its government, to its popular culture, to two of the things that the American colonizers were (and still are) most remembered for—education and sanitation.
Though both the education and sanitation initiatives during the American colonial period in Manila were headed by men, the apparent target of the American colonial health and sanitation education campaign were girls and women. Hygiene and sanitation were deeply intertwined in the American colonial education system, becoming compulsory subjects for primary and secondary school students, though more emphasized for girls than for boys.
Beyond the education system, discussions on hygiene and sanitation bled into what are traditionally considered female spheres of activity, such as cookbooks and housekeeping manuals. Advertisements for goods relating to hygiene and sanitation in Manila newspapers and magazines emphasized the housewife's role in maintaining the status quo—a clean, healthy home was a happy home. I will be examining these, alongside official papers from the Department of Public Instruction and the Bureau of Health, to understand the extent of the pervasiveness of the American colonial sanitation education in the everyday lives of girls and women in Manila.
This paper aims to locate the space women occupied—often overlooked—in the scheme of the masculine realm of health and sanitation education in Manila between the years 1900 to 1920, both as empty vessels for, reactors to, and transmitters of colonial knowledge. More importantly, it aims to examine the complex relationships and interactions between hygiene, sanitation, education, colonialism, and women during an indubitably exciting time in Philippine history.
Convergence and contradiction in the policies of Manila’s Department of Transportation and Sanitation
Michael D. Pante, Ph.D Candidate
Ateneo de Manila University
The Department of Transportation and Sanitation was established on 1 July 1906 as an executive arm of the municipal government of the city of Manila. Initially a division of the Department of Engineering and Public Works, it became a separate entity that reflected the Amercan colonial government’s increasing preoccuation with the issues of public health and urban mobility. The powers and responsibilities of the new department covered a diverse set of tasks pertaining to urban living: from street sprinkling to city transportation to the maintenance of public slaughterhouses. This wide-ranging scope of tasks revealed the colonial state’s philosophy toward urban sanitation: a healthy city is a mobile city. The Americans believed that a speedier movement of passengers, products, and even wastes was essential to keep the city in a sanitary condition. Nonetheless, such a belief was contested from many fronts. Cynical Manila residents and even American colonial officials saw contradictions in this trumpeted covergence between mobility and salubrity.
IMPERIAL MEDICINE AND INDIGENOUS ADAPTATION: PUBLIC HEALTH
CAMPAIGNS AND DISEASE CONTROL IN THE PHILIPPINES DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION PERIOD
Arnel E. Joven, Ph.D
University of Asia and the Pacific
When the Imperial Japanese Army arrived in Manila in 1942, their first priority was the optimum protection of their soldiers. The Philippines has by then undergone forty years of American colonial tropical medicine – a critical period when public health and sanitary policies were introduced with a proliferation of public hospitals and western-trained doctors. Realities presented by the Pacific War created widespread shortages and dislocations, in which the Japanese themselves stepped in to stem the tide of diseases and malnutrition. It was at this point that the Japanese introduced what Michael Shiyung Liu (2009) referred as “southern medicine” – a revised version of colonial state medicine introduced in Taiwan. This paper looks at the tell-tale policies and programs enacted by the Japanese Military Administration in the Philippines that followed the patterns of state medicine introduced decades before in Japan and in colonial Taiwan.
Through Filipino government health officials and medical professionals, the Japanese introduced programs and policies that: introduced the Japanese Army as the sponsor of health policies, centralised all medical programs and the government, incorporated all civilian health institutions under government control or influence, prioritised university-based laboratory research over hospital-based clinical practice, enacted endless malaria eradication programs, and promoted Japanese superiority in medical science. However, it was through the efforts of Filipino officials that health campaigns were enacted in the form of executive orders, newspaper campaigns, hospital policies, calisthenic exercises, and nutrition programs. In late 1943, the Philippine government vigorously emphasised adaptation, i.e. the promotion of research and usage of indigenous medicine in the absence of western pharmaceuticals. In the midst of active resistance against the Japanese within a period of widespread shortages that brought about malnutrition and disease, Filipinos regardless of political loyalty strove to push for the well-being of the public-at-large. In discussing the various health policies promoted from 1942 to 1944, this research employs ‘health-seeking behaviour’ – a term borrowed from medical anthropology. Primary sources include archival records, official reports, newspaper articles, published memoirs/diaries, and oral interviews.