For historians of health and medicine, Southeast Asia is a fascinating area to explore. It has been ravaged by cholera, malaria, the plague, smallpox, yellow fever, dysentery, and several other diseases; today, it is associated with the avian flu and SARS. During the eras of imperial exploration and colonial settlement, Europeans were plagued by fear about the threats that disease posed to their health, not without reason, as white settlements were often decimated by disease. Disease does not recognize borders and imperial divides; the health challenges that Southeast Asian countries have faced have been, and continue to be, the same. Yet the response to these health challenges has varied considerably, depending on the state of medical knowledge at the time, population density, population movement, the nature of colonial administration, and the organization of medical services. Southeast Asia was colonized by the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Americans; each had a different approach to organizing health care. When these colonies became independent, the variety of approaches only increased. The essays in this edited volume build on a relatively new approach to the history of medicine in Southeast Asia by transcending developments in specific nation-states and taking the region as a whole into account. Several recent collections have addressed the history of health and medicine in Southeast Asia (see Lewis and McPherson 2007; Bu, Stapleton, and Yip 2012; Monnais and Cook 2012; Peckham and Pomfret 2013); this volume is a welcome addition in this growing area of scholarship.
