The essays found in Translating the Body: Medical Education in Southeast Asia, edited by Hans Pols, C. Michele Thompson, and John Harley Warner, all address the same core problematic: how does Western medical knowledge become translated, transmitted, and eventually transformed in Southeast Asia as part of medical education and public health campaigns, and what does this process tell us about social and political change across the region throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods? Although ostensibly organized around “medical education,” this volume interprets education in the widest possible terms, looking beyond formal medical training to consider “all the means through which people were persuaded to think differently about their own bodies” (p. 4).

The goal of Translating the Body is to highlight efforts, both foreign and homegrown, to change health beliefs and behaviors as a kind of civic duty and, later, as an act of political citizenship. In its attention to the active, selective appropriation of medical concepts across cultures, the material culture of pedagogy, and bodies as both sites of state intervention and experiential knowledge, this edited volume responds to multiple, intersecting trends in the writing of medical history. Particularly valuable is the insistence on the specificity of local contexts while also emphasizing the transnational movements of ideas, experts, and technologies that knit these stories together.

Highlights of the volume point to the diversity of topics represented and underscore the partial and contested reception of Western medical education by colonial subjects. These include Liesbeth Hesselink on the challenges of training young Javanese women in nursing and midwifery outside official Dutch channels; Francis Gealogo on the critique following the response to the influenza epidemic in the Philippines as also a critique of American oppression; and Laurence Monnais on the selective appropriation of Western pharmaceuticals in colonial Vietnam as evidence of the development of a dynamic and pluralistic medical marketplace. With the fall of European empires and the emergence of newly independent governments came efforts at collective identity building and nationalist revival, as seen clearly in fascinating essays by Jenna Grant on the 1960 construction of the Khmer Soviet Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh and by Junko Iida on the “invention” of traditional medicine in Thailand.

For historians of Southeast Asia, Translating the Body offers a fresh perspective on questions about identity, agency, and nationalism by insisting on seeing medical education as a “political act.” It therefore seeks to do more than advance the history of medical ideas and practices, although it does that too. By underscoring those cultural, social, and political formations that shaped the transmission of medical education, these essays also help us to better understand how medical experts and the populations they served participated in the creation of new subjectivities informed by considerations of race, class, gender, and citizenship.