2013 EASTS, Tokyo
Inst. Of Technology, Togo Tsukahara’s Session on
Disaster, Climate and
Medicine in Colonial History of East Asia.
History of Disaster: Climate
Studies combined with Medical History from East Asian Colonial Context.
(気候学史と医学史の観点からの東アジアの災害史)
Organizers:
Prof. Dr. Togo Tsukahara (塚原東吾、神戸大学教授)
Prof. Dr. Shin Chang Geon（愼蒼健、東京理科大学教授）
Commentators:
Prof. Dr. Song Sang Yong (宋相庸教授) from Korea (韓国科学史学会、生命倫理学会、元会長)
Prof. Dr. Zhou Cheng (周程) from Beijing
University（北京大学教授）
Presenters:
Dr. Zhu Marlon（朱瑪瓏博士）, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
(台湾中央研究院)
Dr. Law Yuen Han (羅婉嫻博士), Hongkong Baptist
University （香港バプティスト大学）
Prof. Dr. Togo Tsukahara and Asso.Prof. Dr. Masumi Zaiki （財城真寿美、成蹊大学准教授）
Discussants:
Prof. Dr. Wataru Iijima (飯島渉、青山学院大学教授),
Prof. Dr. Shigeo Sugiyama（杉山滋夫、北海道大学教授）
Prof. Dr. Takehiko Mikami (三上岳彦、平成帝京大学教授)
Asso.Prof. Dr. Kim Boumsoung (金凡性、広島工業大学准教授)
Asso.Prof. Dr. Tomo Ichikawa (市川智夫、元上海交通大学、現長崎大学准教授)
(Purpose of Session)
As the organizers of this conference claimed, in our East Asian Community, we have experienced such earthquakes of 921 at Taiwan in 1999, Sichuan in 2008, Tohoku in 2011, and numbers of Typhoons and epidemics, also all different forms of natural/man-made disasters. Our conference aims at examination of these experiences from STS. We should observe the cases from the perspectives of the scientific and technological points of view with its social interactions. It should now be examined whether if the decision making before and after these disasters were taken appropriately or not, as a part of tasks for STS-ers. As we see Fukushima, we have just experienced that technology itself could cause huge damage to the society. We have seriously recognized the limit of technological counter measure like coastal dykes against tsunami, and we feel it necessary to re-consider these problems from STS perspectives in our East Asian context. What should be the most effective precautionary measurements? Can we develop sciences and technology which is able to predict, and properly prepare for the potential disasters?
In order to answer these questions, this session will take a position in history of sciences and medicine. We would like to focus on the fact that climatology and epidemic medicine must be the one of the answers to this question.
Prediction of earthquake is still preliminary, but Typhoon prediction is reliable. We agree that epidemiology and hygienic medicine (hygienic modernity) has so far successfully controlled major epidemic outbreak in last several decades. What can we learn from these successful cases? And, the critical question that we should keep asking is that are these sciences/medicine really successful?
In this session, we would like to look into historical background for those sciences in context of colonial history of sciences. It is considered that mainly for the purpose of colonial management, partly in order to avoid disasters, sciences related to climate/meteorology and medicine were developed co-productively in colonial context in East Asia.
I our session Dr. Zhu
gave us how British meteorology developed as a case studies. As a historian of
climatology/medicine, after establishment of his series of works of Chinese
coastal meteorology (on Typhoon in 2000 and Ph.D. on committement of Inter-port
mercantile community to meteology in 2012), he will give us a talk on a little
bit wider geographical extention, British meteorological sciences in Culcutta,
India.
Dr. Law will show us
internal relationship between medicine and climatology. With her insights as a
historian of colonial medicine, particularly that of epidemics and colonial
quarantine control, she will discuss how meteorological reports were written by
the Colonial Surgeon. Her presentation also touches further geographically to
Singapore, and to the key concepts like British Tropical Medicine.
Prof. Dr. T. Tsukahara
and Dr. M. Zaiki will discuss how meteorology was practiced in East Asian
colonial ports towns. For that, they shed lights on News papers published in
those British colonial (open) ports, like Hongkong and Shanghai, and also those
open ports of Nagasaki, Kobe and Yokohama in Japan. Those are important nods
for the so-called British colonial media networks, which would then be
connected by telegram. This is a case study of how scientific knowledge of meteorology
were carried around before the telegram networking. Potential disaster, caused by global warming,
is also a part of issue discussed within this historical reconstruction
approach, because history is the only way to know the future.
(Presentation 1)
Henry
Piddington of Calcutta and the Law of Storms for Sailors in the Eastern Seas
Marlon Zhu （朱瑪瓏博士）
Post-doctoral Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica (台湾中央研究院)
Calcutta in the eighteenth and nineteenth century has became in recent years a
new focus of history of science which emphasized the role of “locality and
site” in knowledge production that beyond the Europe-centered narratives.
Scholars of “science and empire” such as Kapil Raj started to examine in the
City’s pivotal role in the making of scientific knowledge and circulation of
colonial information, practice in the eighteenth century. Contrast to the
accordingly revisited fields such as botany, geology, geodesy, cartography,
geography and others, this article focuses on meteorology, examining the
knowledge of tropical storms centered at Calcutta. Henry Piddington
(1797-1858), a British subject in Calcutta and the President of the Marine
Court of Inquiry, had become one of the founders of the studies of tropical
storms among several storm-threatened areas around the world. He published
several articles and books on the tropical storms in the India and China Seas,
which had great influence especially among seafarers. This article argues that
Piddington had further demonstrated the role of Calcutta as the center of
calculation for the accumulation and circulation of the knowledge of tropical
storms.
Keywords: Henry Piddington, Calcutta, Law of Storms, center of calculation
(Presentation 2)
Climatic Observation and Tropical
Medicine in Asian Colonies: the Colonial Surgeon’s Reports of Hong Kong and
Singapore as a Case Study
Law Yuen Han (羅婉嫻博士), Hongkong Baptist University （香港バプティスト大学）
The
significant relation between climatology and medicine began seeing emphasis
during 19th Century when Britain expanded her colonial empire in
Asia. In the early colonial period, the Colonial Surgeon was the initial and
most important officer in charge of all matters relating to health within the
colony. He was responsible for writing a Colonial Surgeon’s Report annually
where he recorded the condition of health and sanitation inside the community.
A detailed description of the information of the colonial climate such as
humidity, temperature, direction of wind and wind speed, was one of the main
characteristics of the early Colonial Surgeon’s Report. As the colonial climate
was totally different from that of their nation of origin, it was a fatal
factor that caused high mortality amongst the colonizers as according to the
Colonial Surgeon’s Report. Colonies were not suitable for the British and the
more information from the Colonial Surgeon, the more dangerous it seemed for
British to stay in the colonies.
Under
the influence of the Colonial Surgeon’s Report, Tropical Medicine then became
the leading research project for medicine in Britain. In order to protect the
health of colonizers, reducing their mortality rate and augmenting the colonial
rule in Asian and African colonies, Britain supported the Tropical Medicine
experts to devote medical research and investigation in this area. The Colonial
Surgeon’s Report provided many first hand source on health conditions in the
colony for further investigation and decision. Also, the record was used as an
evidence to support the necessity of establishing medical institutions in the
colonies, despite numerous objections from the British government in the
earliest days.
This
presentation studies the Colonial Surgeon’s Reports of Hong Kong and Singapore
in the period of 19th Century to examine how climatology affected
the status of Tropical Medicine in colonies and inside Britain. It will focus
on the following aspects: (1) the contents recorded on colonial climate found
in the Colonial Surgeon’s Report; (2) the impression of colonies created and
shaped by the Colonial Surgeon’s Report; (3) the rise of Tropical Medicine in
colonies and Britain; (4) the relationship between imperialism, medicine and
climatology.
(Presentation 3)
19TH
Ccentury Chinese Coastal Meteorology: Climate Reconstruction
based
on Historical Record in English Newspapers
19世紀中国沿岸コロニアル都市での英字新聞に掲載された気象記録の収集とそれらの再現プロジェクト
Togo Tsukahara（Kobe University）and Masumi
Zaiki (Seikei University)
塚原東吾（神戸大学大学院・国際文化学研究科・教授）、
財城真寿美（成蹊大学・経済学部・准教授）
This
presentation will
report the nineteenth century climate data gathering and its reconstruction
based on historical records reported on the English newspaper at the
Chinese-Japanese coastal (colonial port) cities. Most of those Chinese coastal
cities are controlled by British, known as colonial port towns, and most of
places, English language newspapers are published by the British as the medium
for their commercial and public communication. These newspapers are consisting
the parts of the so-called “(British) Imperial media network”, which once has
spread all kinds of news, foremost financial and trade data, all over the
world, in the British Empire that was “without setting sun”. Our research
project is intending to collect meteorological information and data appeared in
those newspapers at the Chinese and Japanese coastal cities, such as Honkong,
Amoi, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Kobe and Yokohama, as well as one of the most
important meteorological stations in the East Asia, Manila. Time-span is targeted mainly before 1873, the
year of the establishment of CCMR (China Coast Meteorological Register), with
special reference to the period around the Opium war 1840-42 and when the five
Chinese ports
were opened by the Convention of
Tientsin in 1884. This time period is comparable to
meteorological observation by the Japanese open ports in the 1850s-60s. This is a
collaboration project between historian and scientists in a pretty STS
methodology: Tsukahara is principally collecting and digitizing these data,
examining historical background for the observation, Zaiki gives technical and
meteorological advice to reconstruct these data comparable to other scientific
data sets.
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