Tuberculosis – The Singapore Experience, 1867–2018 by Kah Seng Loh Li Yang Hsu

Author:Kah Seng Loh, Li Yang Hsu [Kah Seng Loh, Li Yang Hsu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, American Government, Legislative Branch, Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Science, Applied Sciences, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781000762495
Google: ycXADwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 52954222
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-27T01:35:43+00:00

Urban planning for the ‘cubicle city’56

There is a twist to the post-war history of tuberculosis in connection with housing development, which also had a planning dimension similar to the Medical Plan. Overcrowding in the town in the early twentieth century had led to the formation of the SIT, which soon went beyond its original mandate to build a small number of housing for the general population in the 1930s. After the war, housing became a central preoccupation of the British colonial government, and efforts to regulate and sanitise the shophouses and urban kampongs, and rehouse their dwellers in Trust housing, were part of the administration’s attack on the ‘evil giant’ of squalor. Tuberculosis would influence this housing programme, though not in the way we may expect.

In the end, tuberculosis somewhat surprisingly did not play a major or direct role in public housing development. As the Tuberculosis Policy memorandum underlined, in the prevention of tuberculosis, ‘bad housing is known to all to be one of the most important factors – if not the most important – in its spread’.57 The Medical Department and the doctors continued to associate the disease with poorly ventilated and congested housing.58 In 1952, the Department expressed surprise that tuberculosis was not more of a threat ‘in view of the many overcrowded cubicle dwellings which persist with most primitive kitchen and sanitary arrangements, the many squatter areas, and the thousands of hawkers to be met with in Singapore’.59

Such a view showed the urban kampongs to have replaced shophouses as the leading concern of the housing authorities.60 While a milestone in transforming Singapore from a port city of sojourners to a settled society, the rapid population growth of the post-war years pushed larger families out of the town, where it was no longer possible to increase the capacity of the shophouses, while many new migrants were moving directly into the informal settlements. W.E. Hutchinson, a critic of overcrowding before the war and now promoted to Deputy Municipal Health Officer, was concerned about the health effects of these urban trends, warning ‘Whatever may be the killing property of overcrowding [in the Central Area] or the ill-health that may result, it has nothing of the urgency that now exists in the creation of these insanitary kampongs’.61

The advice of Hutchinson and other doctors in the colonial service shaped the conclusions of the Singapore Housing Committee, which was formed in 1947 to chart a preliminary plan for the government’s response to the housing issue. In underlining the need for good, sanitary housing, the committee made specific reference to tuberculosis. It repeated Hutchinson’s pre-war opinion that as a preventive measure, ‘proper housing conditions should make extensive sanatoria superfluous’.62 Medical practitioner K. Kiramathy Pathy also cautioned the committee that ‘Overcrowding in insanitary cubicles contributes to the spread of many diseases especially of infants and of lung troubles’.63 The chairman of the Committee concurred with Vickers and Hutchinson that, as a means of prevention, good housing was superior to sanatoria:

we hear often today that Government should spend millions on sanatoria and clinics to cure tuberculosis.

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