POPULAR histories, such as those contained in newspapers, are always a source of enlightenment or alternative view of the past. I was reading a digital copy of the Manila Cable News, a newspaper published during the American Occupation. In its issue dated January 3, 1903, a page stands out for its “unusual” concerns. The page lists a detailed assignment of American dentists all detailed to take care of the dental needs of American soldiers out in the field. By this time, any Filipino who rose up in arms against the Americans were either called ladrones (thieves) or insurrectos (insurgents). And yet, the imperialists were concerned with dental hygiene.
On the same page can be found what seems like a regular feature, with the title “Cholera News.” It says: “The cholera situation in the provinces for the 24 hours ending at eight o’clock yesterday morning showed a slight gain for that period over the preceding day, there being 62 new cases and 42 deaths.” Then it states the details of new cases and deaths in Zambales, Oriental Negros (sic), Capiz and Misamis provinces.
From this news, one gets an impression about how regular the monitoring of the “cholera situation.” But there is another image that comes out of this health focus: the Philippines was a land of diseases.
In his paper, “Immunization and Hygiene in the Colonial Philippines,” published in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 62, Issue 1, January 2007, Warwick Anderson writes: “During the Philippine-American war of 1898 to 1902, the Spanish health system broke down completely. As they advanced, American forces established in its place a new stratum of public health institutions, based directly on a military model…. It divided the city into 10 districts and appointed a municipal physician to each. During this period, separate hospitals for smallpox, leprosy and venereal diseases were established, and a veterinary corps was organized. In August 1899, the board added a bacteriological department to its municipal laboratory and set up a plague hospital.”
On April 6, 1901, a health ordinance was promulgated by the Americans. This “became the foundation of a new civil health organization: it was the basis of all subsequent ordinances and of the sanitary code,” as Warwick writes.
Mass vaccination, demonized under the present dispensation, was an American legacy and became an important part of the accomplishments of the colonial health authorities. Warwick describes the mass vaccination as conducted with a “military rigor.” Smallpox vaccination, according to the report, became “thus one of the first medical means of intervening in Philippine social life.”
Significantly, Warwick took note of the symbolic importance of this mass vaccination and whatever success it had gained: “the control of contagious disease in the archipelago indicated the beneficence of American occupation: health officers were saving the Orient from itself, leading its people onto the path of science, progress and health.”
Where did that health legacy bring us to? Looking around in this present chaos around the coronavirus, it seems we really have never evolved a better health system. Give and take the evils wrought upon us by the expansion of the American empire, how we conduct surveillance and monitoring remains crude.
Most of our TV networks are hysterical about the reporting of the disease. It is true what they say, in the gaps and interstices of formal discourses can be found the other texts about order and disorder.
What is happening is that it is not only the coronavirus that is going viral but the news—informed and misinformed—about it.
A few days back, the Internet carried the photo of a man unconscious on the pavement. A man reports that he thinks the man is “Asian.” Interestingly, the good man did not use the word “Chinese.” The networks captured this scene. A police line demarcated the area where the “sick” was. The citizen who was concerned enough about the implication of a man falling down, sick and unconscious started to call the police, the Red Cross, a hospital. There were no responses from these institutions.
After an hour, the man on the pavement could not be found anymore. Some witnesses said the man stood up and walked away. We do not know how reliable the words that filtered in: that man was not Chinese and was not sick; he was a Korean who got so drunk that he fell unconscious to the ground.
The man who reported this incident soon was being criticized. Fortunately, there are intelligent insights arising out of that incident. These were the facts that no police came to the scene, no Red Cross responded, and no hospital came running to look into the situation.
As I began writing this today, Tuesday, February 4, I was viewing a streaming video of the hearing in the Senate about how the health authorities were responding to the present health crisis. Onscreen could be seen Sen. Pia Hontiveros asking Health Secretary Francisco Duque III about the situation on the field. Below the images were text from viewers lambasting the senator about misdemeanors and corrupt practices she is allegedly involved in. The messages were relentless and ranged from screaming exposés and expletives that had nothing to do with virus or other vices.
A few days back, a “sad” story about a Filipino family observing how a Chinese family avoided joining them in the elevator circulated online.
The implication of the story was that this Chinese family is so concerned about fear of contaminating the Filipino family, they would rather stay behind instead of adding anxiety to the Filipinos. A rejoinder to that post, however, revealed the anecdote as a prepared “narrative” spread by different people with the purpose of creating a sympathetic note favoring the Chinese. The narrative of mass vaccination is a phantom of history. Here we are, timid in the use of ethnicity as being related to an epidemic and the spread of a disease. It is as if we should not blame Wuhan because, as some government officials put it, the virus has spread anyway to other parts of the globe.
Here is a situation where the Philippines and the Filipinos are not the “unwell,” but the government is suppressing that mindset. The reporting about the spread of the virus has been so slow that we were left scared in the dark. The spread of knowledge was hampered by health officials who would not tell the full story. When that Chinese woman reported on her own to the health authorities, the latter did not mention she was with a partner who was very sick and who eventually would die. If we are to believe the news reports, the Philippine airport authorities were not properly informed what to do with transit travelers. They found themselves following an instruction not to allow passengers of airlines coming from China into the country; now they are facing the problems of not allowing passengers who got into the Philippines to leave the country.
The Warwick paper indicates how the “crusade for cleanliness sharpened social divisions [and legitimated social categories] in the Philippines, further separating colonized from colonizers, the sick from the healthy, native disease carriers from non-immune foreigners.” In the end, all the diseases were Tropical and the West was the bastion of good health. In the end, we are deathly scared being accused of racism instead of being conscious with our science and our health.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes