Over the past twenty years, histories of colonial medicine and public health have proliferated across Asia. Mostly, these historical inquiries have traced the boundaries of the nation to come: they constitute a set of proto-national histories, whether of India, Vietnam, Taiwan, or the Philippines. Even in diverse settings, they tend to display a standard style and a predictable narrative, following the routine trajectory of “development” and “modernization,” notwithstanding a critical appraisal of these trends. Thus we learn about the recurrent racialization of Western medical theories and practices in colonial settings; the shift from maintaining sanitary enclaves for whites to interfering with the customs and habits of the locals, first in the U.S. and French empires, later in the British Empire; and the pattern of resistance or indifference toward imperial public health interventions, followed by the efforts of the decolonizing elite to adjust to them and appropriate them, to make them national projects. These are stories worth telling—and telling again. But until recently, we have known little about the regional interconnections of colonial public health programs.

Colonial health officers, and the nationalist doctors who were taking over from them, possessed a knack for making comparisons and forging links across colonial borders, a skill not commonly found among their historians. Of course, it is hard to imagine, let alone write, the comparative, intercolonial, or transnational history of medicine, or of anything else for that matter. It is especially challenging to envisage a single historian doing so. In 1987, Norman Owen's Death and Disease in Southeast Asia (New York: Oxford University Press) brought together essays by a wide range of scholars, but the results were patchy and perhaps premature. More successful as comparative history is Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), edited by Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth (with an afterword by me), though it concentrates on a distinctive region and does not tell us much about the rest of Asia. The collection of essays edited by Robert Peckham and David Pomfret, both at the University of Hong Kong, has grander ambitions, signaling fresh efforts to encompass the inter-Asian dimensions of colonial medicine and public health, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Geographers and urban historians contribute many of the chapters in Imperial Contagions, offering new perspectives on the influence of sanitary measures and germ theories on the design and improvement of cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Bombay, and Calcutta. Into the twentieth century, older fears of environmental contamination shaped housing developments and urban planning, often rationalizing the colonizers' lingering desire for sanitary enclaves. Increasingly, however, danger was attached to “native” bodies, their capacity to harbor malignant germs, and the customs and habits of supposedly recalcitrant races, thereby directing attention to surveillance and control of the local population. One of the signal achievements of this collection of essays is the focus, albeit intermittent, on the spaces of colonial medicine and public health. Peckham's chapter on the Hong Kong laboratory, the bamboo shack, of Alexandre Yersin is a deft account of how a particular laboratory space might affect a scientist's identity. Moreover, he demonstrates the permeability of this makeshift laboratory, the ways in which other colonial spaces seeped into it and rendered it hybrid. While attention to spatiality is not unprecedented in the history of colonial medicine, many of these essays illuminate more vividly than before the milieu of tropical medicine. It is disappointing, however, that so few of them address the issue of race—Pomfret goes so far as to argue that microbes were regarded as race blind. Surely it is possible to consider space without thus displacing race.

The editors of Imperial Contagions are seeking a “comparative, transnational framework for rethinking colonial medicine, hygiene, and cultures of planning in Asia” (p. 13). Yet the essays, with two exceptions, concern the British Empire—giving us a sequel and extension to David Arnold's Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)—and mostly they ignore the adjacent empires of the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Japan, and the United States. Pomfret observes the importance of European children in the justification of hygienic enclaves like Victoria Peak in Hong Kong and Dalat in French Indochina—while paying no attention to the virtually childfree (but very manly) hill station of Baguio in the Philippines. Laurence Monnais contributes a rich and detailed essay on the French propensity to dispense quinine in Indochina, their preference for manipulating colonized populations rather than the colonized environment that generated mosquitoes—and again, there is no comparison with other imperial medical formations. The focus on the British Empire in all the other essays helps the reader to understand the backwardness of its colonial outposts compared, for example, to the more “progressive” and interventionist American regime in the Philippines, but little if any of this comparative work appears in the text. Nor do we get a feeling for the interactions occurring across empires in Asia during this period, the regular making of comparisons and contrasting of models that so engaged colonial bureaucrats.

Imperial Contagions takes us a step further toward more interactive, and less bounded, histories of colonial medicine in Asia. It draws attention to the pathologizing of colonial space, the heterogeneity of medical practice, and the fragmentary and partial authority of imperial public health. It leads us to consider again the late-colonial obsession with improvement and benevolence, and the relations of this self-serving and often delusory project to later national and international enthusiasm for development. An important collection, the book complements Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, edited by Qizi Liang and Charlotte Furth (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010): together these collections provide a platform for more extensive comparative, intercolonial studies of Asian biomedicine and public health. I hope that future studies will give more credence to the racialization of bodies that accompanied the pathologizing of spaces, and will examine more critically how these colonial projects shaded into national ambitions, how local medical elites turned colonial medicine into their own version of social medicine. Imperial Contagions gives me the impression that after twenty years of historical inquiry we are ready to do this, perhaps collaboratively, across empires in Asia.