Seeing Health like a Colonial State

This chapter explores connections between sensory experiences of sight and citizenship in Pacific Island assistant physicians’ medical education and work in the New Hebrides. ¹ Adapting Warwick Anderson's (1998, 2006a, 2006b) analysis of “colonial biomedical citizenship” as “probationary,” based on colonial medicine as “a liberal strategy of deferral, not exclusion” (Anderson 2006b, 4), I suggest that the work of the assistant physicians’ (then called “Native Medical Practitioners” (NMPs) ² be seen as “nascent biomedical citizenship,” for they connected civic and medical practice with new forms of identity, political organization, agency, and entitlement. Without doubt, from the colonizer's worldview, the assistant physicians’ entitlements were probationary, but in analyzing the ways in which the practitioners conducted themselves and articulated their work, I argue that they did not think of their status that way. They considered themselves Islanders with claims to participate in European social forms, the improvement of health status, and the expansion of state governance through civic behaviors.