Mixed medicines : health and culture in French colonial Cambodia /

With cogent anecdotes and statistics from Cambodia's colonial archives, independent scholar Au challenges the narrative of Europeans bringing scientific improvements to backward regions. She shows that Khmer people refused to serve as docile subjects for medical experts with Western training. Instead, villagers and urban residents followed their own perceived interests, relying on popular medicinal drugs, whether European, Khmer, or Sino-Vietnamese in origin, and combining those remedies with familiar healing customs. Au's examples center on unsuccessful vaccination campaigns against the plague and cholera, as well as failed French attempts to manage leprosy in Cambodia. In the context of discussing maternity and other women's health issues, Au shows how little is known about the relative empowerment of Khmer women before and during colonialism. She also complicates cross-cultural studies of health and medicine by highlighting how ineffective Europeans looked in Cambodia, where they were perpetually short of funds and far from their centers of power. Undergraduates may prefer a more accessible book such as Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) or Sheldon Watts's Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism (1997), but scholars will appreciate the intricacy of Au's theoretical claims. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty. E. J. Peters Culinary Historians of Northern California