Bamboo Dwellers: Plague, Photography, and the House in Colonial Java

Meerwijk, Maurits Bastiaan

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_8

Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk⁴

Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History ((MBSMH))

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Abstract

When plague was diagnosed in Java in 1911, Dutch colonial health officials implicated the Javanese house 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 patients, Dutch investigators discovered a proliferation of rat cadavers and rat 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 1.6 million houses were either renovated or rebuilt, millions more subjected to periodic inspection and countless Javanese exposed to plague propaganda. Drawing on the extensive photographic record of plague in Java, this chapter asks: how did this transformed materiality of the classical ‘plague house’ come about in the Dutch colonial context?

Research leading to this chapter was funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme ERC grant agreement no. 336564) for the project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic held at CRASSH (University of Cambridge) and the Department of Social Anthropology (University of St Andrews). I am grateful to Christos Lynteris and Susie Protschky for reading through earlier versions of this chapter. My deepest thanks to Johan van Langen, Liesbeth Ouwehand, Ingeborg Eggink, and the staff at the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI) for helping to secure access to key archival materials.

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Notes

1.
W. Th. de Vogel, ‘The Connection of Man and Rat in the Plague Epidemic in Malang, Java, in 1911’. In Francis Clark (ed.), Transactions of the Second Biennial Congress Held at Hongkong 1912, pp. 147–149 (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1913).
2.
A. A. F. M. Deutmann, ‘The Plague in Karanglo’. In Publications of the Civil Medical Service in Netherlands India vol. 1b, pp. 58–138 (Batavia: Javasche Boekhandel en Drukkerij, 1912), p. 115. Closed Stores Journal, S4877 (Wellcome Library).
3.
De Vogel, ‘The Connection between Man and Rat’, p. 148.
4.
Huu Ngoc and Lady Borton, Cây Tre-Bamboo (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2011), p. 13.
5.
Susanne Lucas, Bamboo (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), pp. 30–100. See also: J. A. Loebèr, Bamboe in Nederlandsch-Indië (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1909), pp. 5–24; Willem Wolters, ‘Geographical Explanations for the Distribution of Irrigation Institutions: Cases from Southeast Asia’. In Peter Boomgaard (ed.), A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories, pp. 209–234 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), pp. 223–224; Georges B. Cressey, Asia’s Lands and Peoples: A Geography of One-Third of the Earth and Two-Thirds of its People (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944), p. 536.
6.
Alfred Russell Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1869), pp. 120–121; Alfred Russell Wallace, ‘On the Bamboo and Durian of Borneo’. Hooker’s Journal of Botany 8 (1856): 225–230.
7.
Timothy J. LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 134.
8.
Pfijffer zu Neueck, Skizzen von der Insel Java (Schaffhouser: Franz Hurter, 1829), p. 28.
9.
Bamboo utensils were ubiquitous in the Indies and served both everyday and ritual purposes. In Java, the use of bamboo knives by the dukun (indigenous healer) to cut the umbilical cord or perform circumcision was frequently commented on. Loebèr, Bamboe, pp. 43–46. See also: Liesbeth Hesselink, Healers on the Colonial Market: Native Doctors and Midwives in the Dutch East Indies (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), pp. 124–125.
10.
Koloniaal Verslag 1911, p. 208. Index 2.02.21.01, no. 412 (Nationaal Archief).
11.
Loebèr, Bamboe, p. 78; Lisa Drummond, ‘Colonial Hanoi: Urban Space in Public Discourse’. In Laura A. Victoir and Victor Zatsepine (eds.), Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840–1940, pp. 207–229 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014), pp. 222–223; Robert Peckham, ‘Matshed Laboratory: Colonies, Cultures, and Bacteriology’. In Robert Peckham and David Pomfret (eds.), Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia, pp. 133–134 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), pp. 123–147; Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 211; G. Verschuur, Aux Colonies d’Asie dans l’Océan Indien (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1900), pp. 116–120.
12.
Rice imports were speculated to have introduced plague rats and fleas from India or China to Java. In later years, local rice trade was thought to similarly disseminate plague within Java. The focus on the native plague patient or corpse in Hong Kong and Bombay was not evident to the same extent in Java. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 200–239; Christos Lynteris, ‘Suspicious Corpses: Body Dumping and Plague in Colonial Hong Kong’. In Christos Lynteris and Nicholas H. A. Evans (eds.), Histories of Post-Mortem Contagion: Infectious Corpses and Contested Burials, pp. 109–134 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 119–122.
13.
On plague’s association with the home, see, for instance: Mary P. Sutphen, ‘Not What, but Where: Bubonic Plague and the Reception of Germ Theories in Hong Kong and Calcutta, 1894–1897’, Journal of the History of Medicine 52, no. 1 (1997): 81–113. On plague’s urban identity, see: Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson and Christos Lynteris (eds.), Plague and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
14.
Prashant Kidambi, The Making of a Modern Metropolis: Colonial Government and Public Culture in Bombay, 1889–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 64–69; Echenberg, Plague Ports, pp. 246–255; James C. Mohr, Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 69–98.
15.
On plague’s association with ‘things’, spaces, and soil, see, for instance: Robert Peckham, ‘Hong Kong Junk: Plague and the Economy of Chinese Things’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90, no. 1 (2016): 32–60; Christos Lynteris, ‘A “Suitable Soil”: Plague’s Urban Breeding Grounds at the Dawn of the Third Pandemic’, Medical History 62, no. 3 (2017): 343–357.
16.
Terence Hull, ‘Plague in Java’. In Norman Owen (ed.), Death and Disease in Southeast Asia: Explorations in Social, Medical and Demographic History pp. 210–234 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
17.
Christos Lynteris, Christos Lynteris, ‘Tarbagan’s Winter Lair: Framing Drivers of Plague Persistence in Inner Asia’. In Christos Lynteris (ed.) Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains. Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors, pp. 65–90 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 66. On epidemic photography, see: Christos Lynteris, ‘The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography: Chinese Wet Markets and the Imagination of the Next Pandemic’, Visual Anthropology 29, no. 2 (2016): 118–132.
18.
On the ways in which photographs, diagrams, and inductive outbreak reports all contributed to a narrative plague model, see, for instance: Lukas Engelman, ‘Making a Model Plague-Paper Technologies and Epidemiological Casuistry in the Early Twentieth Century’, this volume.
19.
A chapter on the demographic impact of plague of 1987 constitutes the most comprehensive history of plague in Java to date; Hull, ‘Plague in Java’, pp. 210–234.
20.
Resident of Soerabaja, ‘Report on the first occurrence, the recognition, and the control of plague in Soerabaja’, 11 May 1911. Het Uitblijven der Wekelijksche Verslagen (Uitblijven), Manuscript Grote Bundel (MGB), no. 4674 (ANRI); Resident of Pasoeroean. ‘Report on the occurrence of plague in the residency Pasoeroean’, May 1911. Uitblijven, MGB, no. 4674 (ANRI); Suze de Vogel to Mother, ‘Letter’, 30 March 1911. Collection Willem Thomas de Vogel, D H 1568 (KITLV); ‘Misschien toch pest’, Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indië (6 March 1911), p. 3.
21.
J. de Haan, ‘The Bacteriological Diagnosis of Plague in the District Malang’. In Publications of the Civil Medical Service in Netherlands India vol. 1a, pp. 2–29 (Batavia: Javasche Boekhandel en Drukkerij, 1912), pp. 2–4. Closed Stores Journal, S4877 (Wellcome Library).
22.
The Dutch ‘lived in anxious suspense’ of plague following two cases at Deli in 1905. Earlier, in 1899, Dutch insurance companies expressed concern for its introduction following an outbreak at Penang. Plague was epidemic in Manila between 1899 and 1906. Still, preventative measures were scant and by 1911 the archipelago barely had two functioning quarantine stations; I. Snapper, ‘Medical Contributions from the Netherlands Indies’. In Paul Kratoska (ed.), South East Asia: Colonial History vol. 3, pp. 129–152 (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 141–142; J. J. van Loghem, ‘Het Pestvraagstuk voor Nederlandsch-Indië’, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 53 (1909): 44–51; Hans Pols, ‘Quarantine in the Dutch East Indies’. In Alison Bashford (ed.), Quarantine: Local and Global Histories, pp. 85–102 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 90–91; Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, pp. 61–63; Soerabaja health insurance companies to Governor-General, ‘Letter’, 1899. Uitblijven, MGB, no. 4674 (ANRI).
23.
De Haan, ‘The Bacteriological Diagnosis of Plague’, pp. 5–6; Algemeen Secretaris to Unknown, ‘Telegram’, 6 April 1911. Uitblijven, MGB, no. 4674 (ANRI).
24.
Governor-General to Ministry of Colonies, ‘Telegram no. 23’, 2 April 1911. Geheim Archief Koloniën 1901–1962, index 2.10.36.50, no. 763 (Nationaal Archief).
25.
David Arnold, ‘Disease, Rumor and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919’. In Robert Peckham (ed.), Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, pp. 111–129 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), pp. 111–112; Christos Lynteris, Ethnographic Plague: Configuring Disease on the Chinese-Russian Frontier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 121–122; Idenburg to de Waal Malefijt, ‘Letter’, 5 April 1911. Brieven van A. W. F. Idenburg 24 April 1907 t/m 25 Juni 1911, Box 5, Folder 38, Archief J. H. de Waal Malefijt Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU).
26.
J. de Bruin and G. Puchinger, Briefwisseling Kuyper-Idenburg (Franeker: T. Weber, 1985), pp. 238–242, note 2; W. Th. de Vogel, ‘Extract from the Report to the Government on the Plague Epidemic in the Subresidency of Malang (Isle of Java), November 1910 till August 1911’. In Publications of the Civil Medical Service in Netherlands India vol. 1a, pp. 30–111 (Batavia: Javasche Boekhandel en Drukkerij, 1912), pp. 45–50. Closed Stores Journal, S4877 (Wellcome Library).
27.
Lynteris, ‘A “Suitable Soil”’, pp. 343–357; Peckham, ‘Hong Kong Junk’, pp. 32–60; Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris, Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2020).
28.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, pp. 42–87; Governor-General to Ministry of Colonies, ‘Telegram no. 334’, 5 April 1911. Geheim Archief Koloniën 1901–1962, Index 2.10.36.50, no. 763 (Nationaal Archief); Resident of Soerabaja to Secretariat of the Governor-General, ‘Letter’, 14 May 1911. Uitblijven, MGB, no. 4674 (ANRI).
29.
The civil medical service was only created in January 1911. As Idenburg put it in a letter to the Ministry of Colonies, ‘no one had thought to expect the disease within the interior’; Idenburg to de Waal, ‘Letter, 5 April 1911.
30.
Governor-General to Ministry of Colonies, ‘Telegram’, 26 May 1911. Uitblijven, MGB, no. 4674 (ANRI).
31.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, pp. 32–33; Suze de Vogel to Mother, ‘Letter’, 4 May 1911. Collection Willem Thomas de Vogel, D H 1568 (KITLV).
32.
Ministry of Colonies to Governor-General, ‘Telegram no. 329’, 3 April 1911. Geheim Archief Koloniën 1901–1962, index 2.10.36.50, no. 763 (Nationaal Archief).
33.
Van Loghem, ‘Het Pestvraagstuk voor Nederlandsch-Indië’, pp. 44–51.
34.
‘Genootschap ter bevordering van natuur-, genees-, en heelkunde te Amsterdam’. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 54 (1910): pp. 1798–1804.
35.
This position differs markedly from the British handling of plague in Hong Kong and Bombay, where foreign scientists played prominent roles in plague science and control. The notion of ‘viral sovereignty’, floated by the Indonesian health minister during the H5N1 outbreak in the 2000s and, according to the anthropologist Celia Lowe, informed by ‘postcolonial sensibilities’, aptly captures Dutch reluctance to involve foreign scientists and foreign physicians in plague control; Celia Lowe, ‘Viral Sovereignty: Security and Mistrust as Measures of Future Health in the Indonesian H5N1 Influenza Outbreak’, Medicine Anthropology Theory 6, no. 3 (2019): 109–132.
36.
Paul-Louis Simond, ‘La propagation de la peste’, Annales de l’Institut Pasteur 12, no. 10 (1898): 625–687.
37.
N. H. Swellengrebel, ‘Mededeeling omtrent Onderzoekingen over de Biologie van Ratten en Vlooien en over Andere Onderwerpen, die Betrekking Hebben op de Epidemiologie der Pest op Oost-Java’. In Mededeelingen van den Burgerlijken Geneeskundigen Dienst vol. 2:1, pp. 1–86 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1913).
38.
Similar uncertainties about the role of the rat prevailed in plague outbreaks elsewhere, see, for instance: Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, pp. 61–63; Myron Echenberg, Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914–1945 (Oxford Heinemann, 2002), pp. 106–107; De Vogel, ‘Extract’, pp. 43–44.
39.
J. J. van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts Concerning the Plague in Java’. In Publications of the Civil Medical Service in Netherlands India 1b, pp. 2–57 (Batavia: Javasche Boekhandel en Drukkerij, 1912), pp. 5–6. Closed Stores Journal, S4877 (Wellcome Library).
40.
‘Genootschap ter bevordering van natuur-, genees-, en heelkunde te Amsterdam’. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 54 (1910): 1798–1804.
41.
Well aware of the fraudulent practices this tactic had given rise to elsewhere in Asia. J. J. van Loghem, ‘De Pest op Java’. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 56 (1912): 200–238; de Haan, ‘The Bacteriological Diagnosis of Plague’, pp. 6–24; Michael Vann, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
42.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, pp. 24–42.
43.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, p. 59; Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p. 5.
44.
Deutmann, ‘The Plague in Karanglo’, pp. 113–115.
45.
Carl Mense ed., Handbuch der Tropenkrankheiten vol. 2, p. 403, as quoted in: De Vogel, ‘The Connection between Man and Rat’, pp. 147–148.
46.
Nicholas A. Evans, ‘Blaming the Rat? Accounting for Plague in Colonial Indian Medicine’, Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 5, no. 3 (2018): 15–42, p. 16.
47.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p. 5.
48.
Local Government Kediri to Governor-General, ‘Letter’, 11 May 1911. Uitblijven, MGB, no. 4674 (ANRI).
49.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p. 7; Deutmann, ‘The Plague in Karanglo’, pp. 114–115.
50.
Plague’s spread from dessa to dessa was frequently referred to as ‘metastatic’ over the first decade of plague control in Java. ‘Verslagen van Vereenigingen’, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (1912): 718–732, p. 720.
51.
W. Th. de Vogel to Mother, ‘Letter’, 7 June 1911. Collection Willem Thomas de Vogel, D H 1568 (KITLV).
52.
Peckham, ‘Hong Kong Junk’, p. 35; Ann H. Kelley and Aldumena Marí Sáez, ‘Shadowlands and Dark Corners: An Anthropology of Light and Zoonosis’, Medicine Anthropology Theory 5, no. 4 (2018): 21–49.
53.
On this, see, for instance, the six-volume series Kromoblanda self-published between 1915 and 1923 by the philanthropist H. F. Tillema which proffered a critique of ‘the question of living’ in the colony.
54.
This epiphany was widely attributed to van Loghem but remains undated.
55.
Deutmann, ‘The plague in Karanglo’, p. 115.
56.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, pp. 7–9.
57.
Deutmann, ‘The plague in Karanglo’, p. 115.
58.
Folder with image descriptions, no. 192 A. Paul Christiaan Flu Cabinet drawer 22, slide 24 (Leiden University Library).
59.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p. 14.
60.
Ibid., p. 11.
61.
On photography and its truth claims about 1900 see: Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 6–7; Susie Protschky, ‘Camera Ethica: Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia’. In Susie Protschky (ed.), Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia, pp. 11–40 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), p. 19
62.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, Figure 1.
63.
For instance, Figure 6 (burning of rats) in de Vogel’s government report is also part of a stereoscopic set included in a photographic album by Keasberry. Figure 1 (plague patient with buboes) in the same report is attributed to Deutmann. Neville Keasberry, “Bestrijden van ziektes door een zogaanaamde ‘rattenoven’ in Malang, Neville Keasberry, 1900–1935”, RP-F-2001-17-113 (Rijksmuseum).
64.
Rapport du médecin major de 2ème classe A. Gauducheau sur le Congrès de Hong Kong, p. 32. Ancien Fonds, Indochine, GGI, dossier 39146 (Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer).
65.
De Vogel, ‘The Connection between Man and Rat’, p. 148.
66.
Ibid., Plate ix.
67.
This particular photograph was reproduced in several media, including: Wu Lien-teh et al. (eds.), Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers (Shanghai: National Quarantine Service, 1936), p. 437.
68.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, p. 78.
69.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, Figure 2. See also: Deutmann, ‘The plague in Karanglo’, Figure H.
70.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p. 12.
71.
Van Loghem, ‘De Pest op Java’, p. 211.
72.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, p. 62; Deutmann, ‘The Plague in Karanglo’, pp. 66–67; see also: G. A. Jansen Hendriks, Een Voorbeeldige Kolonie: Nederlands-Indië in 50 Jaar Overheidsfilms, 1912–1962 (Amsterdam: unpublished PhD thesis at the University of Amsterdam, 2014), p. 52.
73.
Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 8. See also: Lynteris, ‘A “Suitable Soil”’, pp. 351–352.
74.
For example, Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, Figure 4; De Vogel, ‘Extract’, Figure 22; Paul Flu cabinet drawer 22, slide 26–27.
75.
This mapping of the rat shelters within the bamboo dwelling was contemporaneous with an investigation of the burrows of the tarbagan, another suspected host of plague, in Manchuria by the Sino-Russian plague commission. As Christos Lynteris has demonstrated, prominent plague physicians theorised that these burrows allowed not only the tarbagan but also the plague bacillus to survive the winter; Lynteris, ‘Tarbagan’s Winter Lair’.
76.
Wu Lien-teh, Plague, p. 437.
77.
Most of this collection is accessible online: http://collectie.wereldculturen.nl. On what constitutes a photograph of plague, see: Lukas Engelmann, ‘What are Medical Photographs of Plague?’, Remedia (August 14, 2017) https://remedianetwork.net/2017/01/31/what-are-medical-photographs-of-plague/#_ftn8 (accessed 14 August 2017).
78.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, pp. 15–16.
79.
Lukas Engelmann, ‘Configurations of Plague: Spatial Diagrams in Early Epidemiology’, Social Analysis 63, no. 4 (2019): 89–109.
80.
De Vogel, ‘The Connection between Man and Rat’, p. 149.
81.
Lynteris, ‘Suspicious Corpses’, pp. 119–122.
82.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p. 20.
83.
Ibid., p. 20.
84.
Ibid., p. 14.
85.
Ibid., p. 14.
86.
Deutmann, ‘The Plague in Karanglo’, p. 121. See also: Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson, and Christos Lynteris (eds.), Plague and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2019); Kidambi, The Making of a Modern Metropolis, pp. 71–113.
87.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, pp. 21–22; de Vogel, ‘Extract’, pp. 79–82.
88.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, pp. 21–22.
89.
This view was already expressed in the initial government plague reports published in 1912, but became more explicit in discussions of the Plague Service established in 1915. Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p. 23; de Vogel, ‘Extract’, p. 79. W. J. van Gorkom, Dienst der Pestbestrijding: Verslag over het Eerste Kwartaal 1915 (Batavia: Javasche Boekhandel en Drukkerij, 1915), pp. 73–74. 987 A 6, W. K. (Koninklijke Bibliotheek).
90.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, Figure 29.
91.
Lynteris, ‘The Prophetic Faculty of Epidemic Photography’, pp. 118–132.
92.
One might think, for instance, of Rembrandt’s Anatomical Lesson (1632), depicting Nicholaes Tulp gingerly lifting up a bundle of muscles in the forearm of a corps to demonstrate the workings of the arm.
93.
Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk, A History of Plague in Java, C4 (in progress).
94.
De Vogel, ‘Extract’, Figure 30.
95.
Displayed at hygiene fairs, exhibits, and medical congresses in the Dutch East Indies, The Netherlands, and overseas as expressions of the productive nature of Dutch colonial rule, the entire set of Dutch plague photography overlapped or fed into still another genre of photography: the camera ethica discussed in: Protschky, ‘Camera Ethica’.
96.
Van Loghem, ‘Some Epidemiological Facts’, p, 23.
97.
Newspaper coverage of the time suggests that the images shown during these lectures corresponded with those contained within the government reports from which the majority of photographs discussed here have been retrieved.
98.
Vereeniging Koloniaal Instituut Amsterdam, Tweede Jaarverslag, 1911–1912 (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1913), p. 15.
99.
W. Th. de Vogel to Mother, ‘Letter’, 31 August 1911. Collection Willem Thomas de Vogel, H 1568 (KITLV).
100.
Resident of Pasoeroean, ‘Memorandum’, 11 August 1913. Terzijde Gelegde Agenda’s (TZG), no. 6671 (ANRI).
101.
‘Rapport omtrent de voorziening van dakpannen voor de woningverbetering bij de pestbestrijding in de residentie Soerakarta’, continuation no. 10. MGS, no. 4958 (ANRI); Louis Otten to Governor-General, ‘Letter’, 13 February 1919. TZG, no. 7149 (ANRI); Dienst der Pestbestrijding: Verslag over het Jaar 1919 (Batavia: Javasche Boekhandel en Drukkerij, 1920), pp. 50–53.
102.
Resident of Pasoeroean, ‘Memorandum’.
103.
W. Th. de Vogel, ‘Report’, November 1912. TZG, no. 6671 (ANRI).
104.
Ibid.
105.
The University of Cambridge Repository-Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic Photographic Database, Item: PhotoID_11649. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.32691
106.
The University of Cambridge Repository-Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic Photographic Database, Item: PhotoID_11632. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.32673

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Meerwijk, M.B. (2021). Bamboo Dwellers: Plague, Photography, and the House in Colonial Java. In: Lynteris, C. (eds) Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_8

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