ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Physicians in the Wild: How American medical expertise Was Racialized, Reworked, and Stabilized in Northeast Indian frontiers

• In Event: Circulating Care: Universities, Hospitals, and the Making of Medical Expertise

English Abstract

In the Second World War, American medicine set out to build hospitals that could function anywhere, from tropical jungles to deserts. This paper argues that the effort to make medical expertise travel across universities, military infrastructures, and colonial spaces reveals how racialized ideas shaped both the practice of wartime medicine and the production of scientific knowledge itself. I begin with the American training programs that prepared physicians for global deployment, programs that treated universities as laboratories for producing a standardized medical workforce. These regimes imagined the modern hospital as a portable scientific environment capable of imposing order on any landscape or body.
The paper then examines what happened when this vision met the realities of the 20th General Hospital in Assam, India. Staffed by personnel from the University of Pennsylvania, the hospital faced unstable supplies, unpredictable disease environments, and the daily challenge of maintaining sanitary routines and reliable records. These frictions exposed the limits of supposedly universal medical standards. They also revealed the hospital’s dependence on racialized categories, particularly the locally recruited ‘number one boys’ who mediated between American caregivers and Chinese patients. Their roles illuminate how assumptions about skill, authority, and bodily disposition operated within a scientific institution that claimed neutrality.
The paper concludes by situating these dynamics within broader U.S. military systems of physical profiling and the segregation of Black soldiers into service and labor units. Together, these histories show that circulating medical expertise was not simply a technical project. It was a racialized process that remade bodies, knowledge, and the very meaning of modern medical practice.

Author

• Ngamlienlal Kipgen