A unique kind of book has arrived to enrich our knowledge of the bilateral medical relations between two large nations in Europe and Asia that have not been the focus of much research on colonial and post-colonial medicine: Indonesia and Germany. Yet it has to be said from the start that it is neither a contribution to (professional) medical historiography nor an edition of sources. It is rather a broad collection of material of highly diverse quality on many aspects related to medicine, originating from historical interest within the German-Indonesian Medical Society. This society was founded in 1996 and is an interesting platform for encounters in itself. The book contains a comprehensive retrospective of different periods in the history of Indonesia and Germany, but concentrating on the former.
As famous figures in the early modern history of naval medicine, Balthasar Sprenger, Andreas Ultzheimer and Engelbert Kämpfer, with their descriptions of the exotic, turn up in the first chapter, along with less well-known employees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). For several of them, their stay on the islands of what is now Indonesia was rather an incidental episode on the passage to and from Japan. When in about 1800 the Dutch state took over from the company, the number of German doctors as researchers and practitioners in the new colony increased, and among them was Franz von Siebold. The most interesting and nearly only original sections in this second chapter are the biography of Friedrich August Carl Waitz, a forgotten medical writer based on Java, by Werner Kraus, and – although more descriptive – the paragraphs by Hans Berg on the work of Adolf Bastian (the founder of German ethnology) on Indonesia.
The next wave of German doctors came after the First World War, and this chapter consists mainly of a compilation of several German medical dissertations. When Germany lost its overseas territories, colonial doctors who did not manage or did not want to find work in Germany looked for employment in countries that would take them. As Africa was largely occupied by the allies, who were not in favour of German staff, Asian countries like China and Dutch India offered important opportunities, especially for former military doctors whose qualifications recommended them for disease control, but also for missionary doctors who opened new mission hospitals. Several of them developed a deep interest in local ways of healing, one of them, Wolfgang Weck, during his later work for the Nazi party became affiliated to medical historiography.
In the 1950s, when Dutch staff had left the country and many German doctors were looking for paid jobs, Indonesia became the developing country with the highest number of German doctors. In co-operation with the German chamber of physicians, doctors who could not earn the necessary money for a practice of their own in Germany or were looking for a better position were recruited by the Indonesian health authorities to serve in various functions. Many worked in very remote areas, like district medical officers in the colonial past, others in highly specialist tasks where Indonesian doctors were not yet available. This section is largely based on the memories of individual doctors and their family members. It offers valuable material that would not be available from missionary or government archives, but demonstrates obvious signs of retrospective restructuring and revaluation which is so common with eye witnesses.
The same can be said for the chapters on more recent decades, dealing with Indonesian doctors staying in Germany for periods ranging from two weeks to several years, with the German medical missionary service and with German doctors working more recently in Indonesia, especially the main editor and author of the volume himself, the microbiologist Hans-Joachim Freisleben. The last two chapters show the greatest heterogeneity of topics. The two reports on successful control of helminths and on the experiences with birds and humans in Papua (including thirty-six pages of colour photos) shed further light on the great diversity of Indonesia and of German interest in it, but, though interesting in themselves, they completely depart from the book’s general line of doctors’ biographies.
From the medical historian’s perspective, the major flaw of the volume is its complete abjuration of footnotes or endnotes in most of the text. The monographs, articles and sources that were used are clearly mentioned, but without references leading from particular information to pages in a publication. This rather journalistic style that might accommodate a broader readership is especially annoying when it comes to unpublished sources. There are few exceptions but only in the original studies mentioned above and in the reports on more recent scientific research and disease control.
The main value of the book lies in the opportunity for German-speaking readers to gain some easily accessible insight into the long history of German–Indonesian encounters in health care and – mainly medical – research. The broad range of perspectives affords chances to individual readers to gain access to particular information, for example on cross-cultural issues when confronted with the practical development of the health care system in Indonesia, for undertaking medical co-operation with Indonesian partners or for shorter stays on one of the islands. To Indonesians mastering the German language, the book is proof of German interest in their country. For the medical historian it mainly forms a further example of what is of interest to doctors of European and non-European nationality in the history of their countries, both as actors in colonial and post-colonial times and as curious collectors, writers and readers.
