DATE: Tuesday, 23 Apirl 2019
TIME: 4:00pm
VENUE: Room 4.04, 4/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

When plague was first diagnosed in Java in 1911, Dutch colonial health officials implicated the houses of the Javanese in the transmission of the disease by sheltering and helping to convey infected rats and fleas to human occupants. In particular, their anxieties were drawn towards the bamboo: Java’s principal building material. Hidden within the hollow interior of the bamboo frame of the houses of plague sufferers, Dutch investigators discovered a proliferation of rat cadavers and rat’s nests. This physical link within the aetiology of plague underpinned an unprecedented colonial intervention in Java’s built environment – home improvement – and equally invasive attempts to reform Javanese domestic and hygienic practices. Up until and even after the development of an efficacious vaccine in the 1930s, over 1.5 million houses were either renovated or rebuilt, millions more subjected to periodic inspection, and countless Javanese re-educated. Drawing on the extensive photographic record of plague in Java, this paper provides an answer to the question - how did this transformed materiality of the classical ‘plague house’ come about in the Dutch colonial context?

Maurits Meerwijk is a historian of medicine and colonialism in Southeast Asia. After completing his PhD on the history of dengue fever in Asia at HKU, Maurits worked as a research associate on the ERC project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic at St Andrews University. His research interests lie at the intersection of infectious disease, disease control, the environment, and visual representation. At present, he is conducting further research on the medical history of late-colonial Indonesia.