The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals

Laurence Monnais is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Asian Studies (CETASE) at Université de Montréal. She specializes in the history of medicine in Southeast Asia, global histories of health and the history of alternative medicines. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she is also co-founder and president of History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMSEA).

• 1. Making medicines modern, making medicines colonial; 2. Medicines in colonial (public) health; 3. The mirage of mass distribution: state Quinine and essential medicines; 4. The many lives of medicines in the private market; 5. Crimes and misdemeanors: transactions and transgressions in the therapeutic market; 6. Learning effects: lived experiences, pharmaceutical publicity and the roots of selective demand; 7. Medicines as vectors of modernization and medicalization; 8. Therapeutic pluralism under colonial rule; Conclusion: from colonial medicines to post-colonial health.

'Historians of colonial medicine and anthropologists who study the social life of pharmaceuticals have been eagerly awaiting this book. With exceptional panache, Monnais shows us how taking the material turn can transform the history of global health into a genealogy of our pharmaceutical present. An anthropological sensibility reveals the everyday practice of state medicine, the fostering of markets for medical commodities, and the creation of modern, drug-dependent consumers. Just like mosquitoes, it seems, drugs have lifecycles and ecological niches, and they can serve too as vectors - not of disease, but rather, of European medicine and modernity.' Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney