Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines by Warwick Anderson

Author:Warwick Anderson [Anderson, Warwick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-03-23T02:17:00+00:00

A NEW ORDER OF COLONIAL HYGIENE

In T916, Victor Heiser, believing that the Filipinization of the colonial bureaucracy was premature, took special care to visit Sulu. The year before, the American health officer for the province, Dr. Ivan B. Hards, had approached a visiting U.S. congressman to tell him that since Heiser had left office, the Filipino civil authorities were grossly neglecting a cholera epidemic." But when Governor Harrison investigated these allegations, Major L. A. I. Chapman, the commanding officer of the local barracks, reported that Hards, perhaps "more interested in maintaining a paid civil practice," had himself shown "but little interest in the cholera situation."" Hards now "emphatically" denied having suggested earlier that his Filipino superiors disliked him reporting the facts. "I have always been instructed by telegram and letters from my official superiors," he assured the authorities, "to report all cases of cholera occurring anywhere within the province."19 Harrison regarded the accusation, now retracted, as typical of the attempts of Heiser and other health officers to "discredit and destroy the work of distinguished members of their own corps." "Among the most annoying and vexatious incidents in the establishment of the civil regime here," the governor-general wrote to Washington, D.C., "has been the effort of certain medical officers to discredit the newly appointed civil officers of the public health service." Hards resigned from his post late in 19 15 and returned to the United States. Harrison replaced him with his deputy, Dr. Marcelino Gallardo. Unlike Hards, Gallardo was reputed to have "distinguished himself during the Sulu cholera epidemic" and displayed "a correct understanding of the fundamentals of combating cholera in accordance with the best modern practice .1120 Yet it was Gallardo who prompted Heiser, as he passed through Sulu, to exclaim, "What an imitator the Filipino is!"

Before 1914, Filipino physicians had generally occupied junior positions in medical institutions under the control of the Philippine government. All six senior officers of the Bureau of Health in 1913 were American; the only Filipino division chief was Dr. Manuel Gomez of the statistics department. At the Philippine General Hospital, Dr. Fernando Calderon was chief of the obstetrics section, but Americans managed the other five units. The senior officers of the bureau's inspection division were, with few exceptions, American physicians, but their assistants all were Filipino. Only two of the seven teen inspectors in the field were Filipino, yet all of the nine junior inspectors were locals. Of the twenty-seven district health officers, a lower-status job in the medical service, no more than three were American.21 All of the senior instructors at the new Philippine medical school were foreigners. Similarly, at the Bureau of Science, the senior researchers were American or European. The first article by a Filipino published in the Philippine Journal of Science - Calderon's discussion of obstetric practice in the archipelago -did not appear until 19o8; the following year, Filipinos were junior authors of only seven of the forty-seven papers presented in the journal. In 1913, Filipino investigators contributed to no more than four of the journal's forty-one medical articles.

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