IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB265422705

The Anatomical Perspective: Epistemology and Ethics in a Colonial Missionary Clinic (2016)

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume: 58
Issue: 1
Pages: 211-241

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/anatomical-perspective-epistemology-and-ethics-in-a-colonial-missionary-clinic/950D1D9E2C0928FD5939FED4D9DD226F

DOI: 10.1017/S0010417515000626

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Indigenous peoples; indigeneity Anatomy Epistemology Medicine and ethics Hospitals and clinics Philosophy of medicine Human body Netherlands, colonies Missionaries and missions Calvinism 19th century Java (Indonesia)

For Dutch Calvinist missionaries in Central Java, two events bookended the radically transformative decade of the 1890s. The first, at the start of the decade, was the severing of relations with a charismatic Javanese leader named Sadrach, a decision that marked a redoubled commitment to suppress local Christian syncretism and to promote Calvinist orthodoxy in its stead. The second, at the decade's end, was the establishment of a modern clinic to serve as the flagship institution of a reformulated and reinvigorated missionary project. This article considers how these two seemingly disparate events are related. It suggests that much of what was troubling to missionaries about Sadrach and his indigenous Christian movement involved their understandings and uses of the body. I then consider how the mission attempted to use modern clinical experience and the anatomical perspective to address a range of ethical and epistemological problems posed by Sadrach and his followers' understandings of the body. The modern clinic would serve as a key pedagogical and disciplinary tool for the reordering of a vocabulary and syntax of bodies and souls, a grammar of religious and social expression.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB265422705/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Hoogte, Arjo Roersch van der; Pieters, Toine; (2013)
From Javanese Coca to Java Coca: An Exemplary Product of Dutch Colonial Agro-Industrialism, 1880--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB001252167/)

Book G. Roger Knight; (2018)
Sugar, Steam and Steel: The Industrial Project in Colonial Java, 1830-1885 (/isis/citation/CBB104279760/)

Thesis Luthfi Adam; (2020)
Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745-1917 (/isis/citation/CBB491950509/)

Article Marco Sgarbi; (2022)
Galileo and the Epistemology of Anatomy (/isis/citation/CBB809395648/)

Article Parry, Bronwyn; (2013)
The Afterlife of the Slide: Exploring Emotional Attachment to Artefactualised Bodily Traces (/isis/citation/CBB001420756/)

Article Swiggers, Pierre; (2009)
David Zeisberger's Description of Delaware Morphology (1827) (/isis/citation/CBB001211626/)

Book Axel Fliethmann; Christiane Weller; (2021)
Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today (/isis/citation/CBB235658573/)

Article Louis Fu; (2016)
Medical Missionaries to China and the Reformation of Anatomy (/isis/citation/CBB891770550/)

Article Fleck, Eliane Cristina Deckmann; (2014)
A abordagem historiográfica dos séculos XIX e XX sobre a atuação de médicos e boticários jesuítas na América platina no século XVIII (/isis/citation/CBB001420728/)

Article McGregor, William B.; (2008)
Missionary Linguistics in the Kimberley, Western Australia: A History of the First Seventy Years (/isis/citation/CBB001211639/)

Article Fountain, Catherine; (2013)
Fray Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta's Work on California's Native Languages (/isis/citation/CBB001211989/)

Chapter Ertsen, M. W.; (2005)
Irrigation design in the Netherlands East Indies: The Tjipoenegara system in West Java (/isis/citation/CBB001180596/)

Article Sebastiaan Broere; (2019)
Picturing Ethnopsychology: A Colonial Psychiatrist’s Struggles to Examine Javanese Minds, 1910–1925 (/isis/citation/CBB670172565/)

Thesis Rankin, John; (2010)
Healing the “African Body” in the Age of Abolition? British Medicine in West Africa, Circa 1800--1860 (/isis/citation/CBB001562764/)

Book Renshaw, Michelle; (2005)
Accommodating the Chinese: The American Hospital in China, 1880--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB000600049/)

Article Robertson, Jo; (2009)
The Leprosy Asylum in India: 1886--1947 (/isis/citation/CBB000932687/)

Article Yan, Yiwei; (2013)
Peter Parker's Medical Activities in Singapore and the Possible Motivation for the Establishment of Early Mission Hospitals (/isis/citation/CBB001450034/)

Chapter Mussell, James; (2011)
Writing the “Great Proteus of Disease”: Influenza, Informatics and the Body in the Late Nineteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB001201383/)

Thesis Tian, Xiaoli; (2011)
Relocating Science: Medical Missions and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century China (/isis/citation/CBB001567287/)

Article Washington, Garrett L.; (2013)
St. Luke's Hospital and the Modernisation of Japan, 1874--1928 (/isis/citation/CBB001421856/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}