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Warwick Anderson. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ix + 355 pp. Ill. $84.95 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-8223-3804-1; ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3804-8), $23.95 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-8223-3843-2, ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3843-7).
This innovative collection of essays succeeds (to paraphrase the author's stated aspiration) in connecting the privy to the empire, offering an exciting, new cultural-political history of Philippine-American colonialism in the early twentieth century. Its loosely connected essays can be read as a history of how concepts of the integral body-and the diverse threats posed to it-mediated between the colonial situation in the Philippines under U.S. rule, on the one hand, and frameworks of whiteness and masculinity on the other. Specifically, Anderson argues for the mutual encoding of medical and civic discourses in the American colonial Philippines, identifying his subject as the history of the development and deferral of what he calls "biomedical citizenship." Exploring these themes across a wide range of imperial-medical projects, Anderson delivers a rich and vital contribution to the cultural history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, to the imperial history of medicine, and to cultural studies of whiteness and masculinity.
The book begins with the Philippine-American War, at the brutal outset of U.S. colonial rule, when U.S. Army medical officers grappled with the myriad organizational and conceptual dilemmas posed by colonial warfare. Anderson describes their application of models of "geographical pathology" (p. 24), which attributed disease to tropical conditions of heat and humidity. When combined with theories of racial geography-Nature's unforgiving desire to fix races in their proper places-these theories gave...