"Health and Medicine in Soekarno Era Indonesia : Social medicine, public health programmes & medical education" a talk by Dr. Vivek Neelakantan at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 5th August 2013
Time : 3:00 pm
Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)
Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info : Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'
Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Seminar (in the ‘India and the wider World’ series) on ‘Health and Medicine in Soekarno Era Indonesia : Social medicine, public health programmes and medical education’ by Dr. Vivek Neelakantan, University of Sydney, Australia.
Abstract : In 1949, newly independent Indonesia inherited a health system that was devastated by seven years of warfare resulting from three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation and four years of revolutionary struggle against the Dutch. The country suffered from an acute shortage of physicians, and those few physicians were mostly concentrated in the large urban centres where a minority of the population lived. Additionally, the Indonesian Ministry of Health had to cope with the resurgence of epidemic diseases such as smallpox and endemic diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and yaws. The Ministry of Health had initiated a number of symbolic public health initiatives—both during the Indonesian Revolution (1945 to 1949) and during the early 1950s resulting in a noticeable decline of mortality—that fuelled the newly independent nation’s self-confidence to the international community that it was capable of standing on its own feet. The early 1950s were thus a period of great optimism in Indonesian public health. Unfortunately by the mid-1950s, Indonesia’s public health program faltered due to a constellation of factors (a) political tensions between Java and the Outer Islands; (b) administrative problems particularly as the provincial and local governments implemented health policy but depended on the centre for the disbursement of finances; (c) political deadlocks; (d) corruption; (e) rampant inflation and (f) political instability. The optimism that characterised the early years of independence paved way for despair. The Soekarno era could therefore be interpreted as the era of bold plans and unfulfilled aspirations in Indonesian public health. This talk relates the history of health of post-World War II Indonesia to the political history of the 1950s and critically examines the way in which promoting the health of the population became closely related with nation-building. Beginning 1950, Indonesian physicians appropriated military metaphors associated with the Indonesian Revolution in order to depict campaign against malaria, tuberculosis, yaws and leprosy as a struggle against the ‘big four’ endemic diseases that drained the overall vitality of the population. They conceptualised disease eradication as symbolic battles that would lead to further victories of the nation such as those against poverty and illiteracy.
Speaker : Dr. Vivek Neelakantan is a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia and has done his M.Phil from the University of Madras. Besides ‘Eradicating Smallpox, the Archipelagic Challenge: Indonesia’ Health and History 12, no.1 (2010): 61-87, he has published articles in Wellcome History also. He is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, USA.
Related Events : Talks | History | Health
Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)
Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info : Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'
Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Seminar (in the ‘India and the wider World’ series) on ‘Health and Medicine in Soekarno Era Indonesia : Social medicine, public health programmes and medical education’ by Dr. Vivek Neelakantan, University of Sydney, Australia.
Abstract : In 1949, newly independent Indonesia inherited a health system that was devastated by seven years of warfare resulting from three-and-a-half years of Japanese occupation and four years of revolutionary struggle against the Dutch. The country suffered from an acute shortage of physicians, and those few physicians were mostly concentrated in the large urban centres where a minority of the population lived. Additionally, the Indonesian Ministry of Health had to cope with the resurgence of epidemic diseases such as smallpox and endemic diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and yaws. The Ministry of Health had initiated a number of symbolic public health initiatives—both during the Indonesian Revolution (1945 to 1949) and during the early 1950s resulting in a noticeable decline of mortality—that fuelled the newly independent nation’s self-confidence to the international community that it was capable of standing on its own feet. The early 1950s were thus a period of great optimism in Indonesian public health. Unfortunately by the mid-1950s, Indonesia’s public health program faltered due to a constellation of factors (a) political tensions between Java and the Outer Islands; (b) administrative problems particularly as the provincial and local governments implemented health policy but depended on the centre for the disbursement of finances; (c) political deadlocks; (d) corruption; (e) rampant inflation and (f) political instability. The optimism that characterised the early years of independence paved way for despair. The Soekarno era could therefore be interpreted as the era of bold plans and unfulfilled aspirations in Indonesian public health. This talk relates the history of health of post-World War II Indonesia to the political history of the 1950s and critically examines the way in which promoting the health of the population became closely related with nation-building. Beginning 1950, Indonesian physicians appropriated military metaphors associated with the Indonesian Revolution in order to depict campaign against malaria, tuberculosis, yaws and leprosy as a struggle against the ‘big four’ endemic diseases that drained the overall vitality of the population. They conceptualised disease eradication as symbolic battles that would lead to further victories of the nation such as those against poverty and illiteracy.
Speaker : Dr. Vivek Neelakantan is a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia and has done his M.Phil from the University of Madras. Besides ‘Eradicating Smallpox, the Archipelagic Challenge: Indonesia’ Health and History 12, no.1 (2010): 61-87, he has published articles in Wellcome History also. He is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, USA.
Related Events : Talks | History | Health
"Health and Medicine in Soekarno Era Indonesia : Social medicine, public health programmes & medical education" a talk by Dr. Vivek Neelakantan at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 5th August 2013
!["Health and Medicine in Soekarno Era Indonesia : Social medicine, public health programmes & medical education" a talk by Dr. Vivek Neelakantan at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 5th August 2013]()
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Monday, August 05, 2013
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