ABSTRACT
This chapter unravels a pair of tuberculosis projects in the 1920s and 1930s that emerged in the aftermath of the Simpson study, contributing to the governance of inter-war Singapore as a British colony. Having surmised tuberculosis to be a disease of working-class Chinese, colonial officials and doctors – both Western and Asian – sought to reimagine Singapore in both physical and social terms. Concretely, the official concerns led to the belated establishment in 1927 of the Singapore Improvement Trust, a sanitary agency which Simpson had proposed. In the early 1930s, the Trust began to build new housing to replace the insanitary shophouses, beginning a process of public housing construction that would eventually transform Singapore. At the same time, a group of doctors debated over the prevalence of tuberculosis in the city. Their ruminations were historically significant, drawing upon the prevailing pseudo-scientific theory of racial immunity and resistance to tuberculosis to label and rank the people of the entrepôt, particularly the Chinese. This had the effect of classifying a diverse immigrant population into distinct races, a way of governance which persists in Singapore to this day.
