Colonial Pathologies is a groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonialization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s. Warwick Anderson describes how American colonizers sought to maintain their own health and stamina in a foreign environment while exerting control over and “civilizing” a population of seven million people spread out over seven thousand islands. He explains how, as colonial doctors and scientists began to focus on microbial pathogens as threats to the health of white colonists, they came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipino’s personal hygiene practices and social conduct. Anderson’s narrative encompasses a colonial obsession with native excrement, a leper colony intended to transform those considered most unclean and least socialized, and the bookworm and malaria programs implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s.

Warwick Anderson is Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics and Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, also published by Duke University Press

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