Talk: The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: An Alternative History of Medicine, Health and the Vietnamese Patient

January 30, 2017

Hannah History of Medicine and Medical Humanities presents:

The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: An Alternative History of Medicine,Health and the Vietnamese Patient, 1905 to 1940

Speaker: Dr. Laurence Monnais, Professor of History – Director, Centre d’Etudes de l’Asie de l’Est (CETASE)

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

3 p.m. – 5 p.m., Health Sciences Centre (HSC), 1A4

Analyzing the ‘life cycle’ (i.e. the production, distribution, and consumption) of drugs in Vietnam under French rule in the first decades of the 20th century; this talk will revisit the co-production of imperialism, medicine, and health. It will emphasize the many roles Vietnamese doctors and pharmacists and also Vietnamese merchants and patients played in transforming the therapeutic landscape of the colony. Ultimately, this history of what Monnais calls ‘colonial medicines’ shows how a ‘peripheral’ history of pharmaceuticals might fuel the study of modern health and healthcare in Southeast-Asia and elsewhere.

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