Hans Pols
Biographic Data
| ID | 266817 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hans Pols |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hans |
| FAMILY NAME | Pols |
| SIGNATURE | POLS H |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1722-3860 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 44 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A History of Plague in Java, 1911-1942
Bubonic plague appeared in Southeast Asia near the end of the nineteenth century. It had been present in China for at least one hundred years before that, mostly in endemic form but with regular epidemic flare-ups. When it appeared in Hong Kong, one of the most important harbors worldwide, in 1894, economic life came to a standstill. Not only did it cause widespread panic because of the high number of infected people and deaths, it also inspired …
German Science in the Age of Empire
Deinstitutionalisation and mental health activism in Australia
Starting in the 1960s, large numbers of patients in Australia’s mental hospitals were released even though hardly any support services were available in the community. By the 1970s, a small number of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, volunteers, and consumer advocates were building alliances and coalitions with each other and with politicians and health bureaucrats to realise change. Using archival records and interviews as sources, w…
Migration in the Time of Revolution
Book Forum
Psychology and psychiatry in the global world
Introduces articles in the special issue of History of Psychology , Psychology and Psychiatry in the Global World Part I. The special issue seeks to consolidate and extend the historical analysis of psychology and psychiatry in the global world by bringing together seven articles detailing how theories, techniques, and practices have been translated, adapted, and appropriated in the colonial and postcolonial eras. The contributions demonstrate th…
Nurturing Indonesia
Hans Pols proposes a new perspective on the history of colonial medicine from the viewpoint of indigenous physicians. The Indonesian medical profession in the Dutch East Indies actively participated in political affairs by joining and leading nationalist associations, by publishing in newspapers and magazines, and by becoming members of city councils and the colonial parliament. Indonesian physicians were motivated by their medical training, thei…
Health and Disease in the Tropical Zone
Acclimatisation theories varied depending on the political and social contexts in which they were used. Historians of medicine have argued that the pessimism of physicians practising in British India about the acclimatisation of white settlers in the tropics increased around the turn of the eighteenth century. Both British and Dutch physicians had long commented on the proverbial unhealthfulness of Batavia, but rather than relating this to the tr…
The Mestizos of Kisar
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst…
Quarantine in the Dutch East Indies
Tropenliebe
Over the past 20 or 30 years, historians of colonial science have written a great number of path-breaking and thought-provoking studies that have changed our perspective on the development of modern science as well as on the role of science and medicine in governing colonial territories. Today, it is no longer possible to write about the origins and development of modern science without taking the decisive influence of exploration, colonialism an…
Histories of Health in Southeast Asia
Additional informationNotes on contributorsHans Pols Hans Pols is associate professor at the Unit for History of Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is interested in the history of medicine in Southeast Asia. He is finishing a book on the history of the medical profession in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia. He is currently engaged in a research project titled “Imagining Indonesian Psychiatry: Past, Present, and Future.”
Building Psychiatric Expertise across Southeast Asia
This paper examines a series of research trips undertaken by French physicians in Indochina to the Dutch East Indies between 1898 and 1937 to study what they saw to be a successful model of a modern psychiatric service that had been developed there. Dutch experiments with forms of 'open door' care and the use of patient labor as therapy, premised on earlier ideas of moral treatment, seemed to hold both therapeutic promise and the key to resolving…
Jungle Fever
Reviewed by: Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives by Charlotte Rogers Hans Pols Charlotte Rogers. Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. ix + 234 pp. $55.00 (978-0-8265-1831-6). Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness narrates how Kurtz, an intrepid explorer who entered the jungle in search of untold riches, suc…
Notes from Batavia, the Europeans' Graveyard
Since the advent of European colonial expansion, medical theories of acclimatization have been inextricably related to convictions about the possibility and desirability of white settlement in the colonies, and political ideas of colonial governance. Before 1800, acclimatization theories emphasized the inherent flexibility of the human constitution and its ability to adapt to new environments. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Euro…
Scientific Patriotism
Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress-not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first …
European Physicians and Botanists, Indigenous Herbal Medicine in the Dutch East Indies, and Colonial Networks of Mediation
During the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, European physicians and botanists working in the Dutch East Indies displayed an eager interest in Indonesian indigenous herbal medicine or jamu, the investigation of which required them to establish contacts with local informers and mediators who could make indigenous medicine understandable to researchers. In the Dutch East Indies, these mediators were Indo-European women who had built up a …
Kinderen van hun Tijd
Journal Article Kinderen van hun Tijd: Zestig Jaar Kinder-en Jeugdpsychiatrie in Nederland, 1948–2008 Get access Timo Bolt and Leonie de Goei, Kinderen van hun Tijd: Zestig Jaar Kinder-en Jeugdpsychiatrie in Nederland, 1948–2008, Assen: Van Gorcum, 2008. Pp. ix + 176. €27.50. ISBN 978 232 4457 8. Hans Pols Hans Pols University of Sydney [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Histo…
Shell Shock and the Australians
Psychological knowledge in a colonial context
This article analyzes the views of 3 Dutch physicians working in the former Dutch East Indies during the first part of the 20th century. These physicians based ideas about the nature of the normal indigenous psyche on both their analysis of Indonesian individuals suffering from mental illness and on casual observations that represented widely shared cultural stereotypes. On that basis, they advocated a psychological colonial policy, which was to …
WAR & Military Mental Health
Involvement in warfare can have dramatic consequences for the mental health and well-being of military personnel. During the 20th century, US military psychiatrists tried to deal with these consequences while contributing to the military goal of preserving manpower and reducing the debilitating impact of psychiatric syndromes by implementing screening programs to detect factors that predispose individuals to mental disorders, providing early inte…
August Hollingshead and Frederick Redlich
SOCIAL CLASS AND MENTAL ILLNESS was the result of an unusually creative and productive collaborative research project undertaken by August Hollingshead, a sociologist, and Frederick Redlich, a psychiatrist. By combining their expertise in their respective disciplines, they became pioneers in the field of medical sociology, social psychiatry, and psychiatric epidemiology; their study is now considered a classic in these fields.1 The main conclusio…
War Neurosis, Adjustment Problems in Veterans, and an Ill Nation
After World War II, the confidence of American psychiatrists was at an all-time high as a result of their successful participation in the war. When the incidence of mental breakdown in the American armed forces rose to unprecedented heights, new and effective psychotherapeutic methods were developed to treat the traumatic effects of the extraordinary stresses of warfare. At the same time, social scientists concluded that breakdown incidence was i…
Biomedical Platforms
Analysing the Mind of Literature
A war of nerves
Scientific Patriotism
Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress-not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first …
WAR & Military Mental Health
Involvement in warfare can have dramatic consequences for the mental health and well-being of military personnel. During the 20th century, US military psychiatrists tried to deal with these consequences while contributing to the military goal of preserving manpower and reducing the debilitating impact of psychiatric syndromes by implementing screening programs to detect factors that predispose individuals to mental disorders, providing early inte…
Divergences in American psychiatry during the Depression
The differences between somatic psychiatrists and mental hygienists, already apparent earlier, became much more pronounced during the Depression years, partly as a consequence of their different perspectives on this social crisis. Somatic psychiatrists, emboldened by the apparent success of new medical treatment methods, reasserted the central position of the mental hospital within psychiatry, attempted to improve the discipline's position within…
Building Psychiatric Expertise across Southeast Asia
This paper examines a series of research trips undertaken by French physicians in Indochina to the Dutch East Indies between 1898 and 1937 to study what they saw to be a successful model of a modern psychiatric service that had been developed there. Dutch experiments with forms of 'open door' care and the use of patient labor as therapy, premised on earlier ideas of moral treatment, seemed to hold both therapeutic promise and the key to resolving…
Anomie in the Metropolis
American sociologists and psychiatrists have often characterized cities as sites of social disintegration conducive to insanity. Small-town rural life, by contrast, has been presented as ideally suited for fostering mental health. Early research in psychiatric epidemiology confirmed these views. After World War II, psychiatrists and sociologists collaborated in influential research projects on mental illness in the community. Although these studi…
Between the laboratory and life
Between 1919 and 1956, psychologists at the University of Toronto built a research program in developmental psychology on a functionalist, holistic, and ecological basis. They conducted longitudinal studies on mental health in growing children in educational settings instead of in laboratories and formed strong alliances with the local educational system in order to do so. They initially defined mental health as adjustment and considered conditio…
Notes from Batavia, the Europeans' Graveyard
Since the advent of European colonial expansion, medical theories of acclimatization have been inextricably related to convictions about the possibility and desirability of white settlement in the colonies, and political ideas of colonial governance. Before 1800, acclimatization theories emphasized the inherent flexibility of the human constitution and its ability to adapt to new environments. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Euro…
Psychological knowledge in a colonial context
This article analyzes the views of 3 Dutch physicians working in the former Dutch East Indies during the first part of the 20th century. These physicians based ideas about the nature of the normal indigenous psyche on both their analysis of Indonesian individuals suffering from mental illness and on casual observations that represented widely shared cultural stereotypes. On that basis, they advocated a psychological colonial policy, which was to …
August Hollingshead and Frederick Redlich
SOCIAL CLASS AND MENTAL ILLNESS was the result of an unusually creative and productive collaborative research project undertaken by August Hollingshead, a sociologist, and Frederick Redlich, a psychiatrist. By combining their expertise in their respective disciplines, they became pioneers in the field of medical sociology, social psychiatry, and psychiatric epidemiology; their study is now considered a classic in these fields.1 The main conclusio…
Traumatic Pasts
1The Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, Australia Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 Mark S.MicalePaulLerner Cambridge University PressNew York 2001xiv + 316$60.00 or £40.00 0‐521‐58365‐9
The Romance of American Psychology
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 71, Number 1, Spring 1997
Constructing the Self, Constructing America
Reviewed by: Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy Hans Pols Philip Cushman. Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995. xiii + 430 pp. $U.S. 27.50; $Can. 35.95. Philip Cushman is a psychotherapist eager to develop a critical perspective on the cultural role of his craft in order to improve its practice. According to him, psychot…
Children, Race, and Power
Reviewed by: Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center Hans Pols Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner. Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. xvii + 304 pp. Ill. $29.95. This book about Harlem’s Northside Center for Child Development provides a vivid account of the internal workings and the day-to-day life of the Center throughout its …
William James on consciousness beyond the margin
Methodology and the Social Identity of Psychology
Measuring Minds
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 1999
Mesmerized
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 73, Number 4, Winter 1999
The Wing of Madness
The Pursuit of Psychoanalysis under Conditions of Communism
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967
Constructing Scientific Psychology
This biography is the first study to appear of the famous neurobiologist and psychologist Karl S. Lashley. Nadine Weidman thoroughly analyzes the position of Lashley's neuropsychological scholarship within the context of the major debates that have occurred within psychology and neurology over the last sixty years: between the protagonists of behaviorism and psychoneurology, between environmentalists and hereditarians, and, within neurology, abou…
Divergences in American psychiatry during the Depression
The differences between somatic psychiatrists and mental hygienists, already apparent earlier, became much more pronounced during the Depression years, partly as a consequence of their different perspectives on this social crisis. Somatic psychiatrists, emboldened by the apparent success of new medical treatment methods, reasserted the central position of the mental hospital within psychiatry, attempted to improve the discipline's position within…
Taming the troublesome child
Between the laboratory and life
Between 1919 and 1956, psychologists at the University of Toronto built a research program in developmental psychology on a functionalist, holistic, and ecological basis. They conducted longitudinal studies on mental health in growing children in educational settings instead of in laboratories and formed strong alliances with the local educational system in order to do so. They initially defined mental health as adjustment and considered conditio…
Between the laboratory and life
Between 1919 and 1956, psychologists at the University of Toronto built a research program in developmental psychology on a functionalist, holistic, and ecological basis. They conducted longitudinal studies on mental health in growing children in educational settings instead of in laboratories and formed strong alliances with the local educational system in order to do so. They initially defined mental health as adjustment and considered conditio…
Traumatic Pasts
1The Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, Australia Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 Mark S.MicalePaulLerner Cambridge University PressNew York 2001xiv + 316$60.00 or £40.00 0‐521‐58365‐9
Analysing the Mind of Literature
Anomie in the Metropolis
American sociologists and psychiatrists have often characterized cities as sites of social disintegration conducive to insanity. Small-town rural life, by contrast, has been presented as ideally suited for fostering mental health. Early research in psychiatric epidemiology confirmed these views. After World War II, psychiatrists and sociologists collaborated in influential research projects on mental illness in the community. Although these studi…
In therapy we trust
A war of nerves
Biomedical Platforms
Psychological knowledge in a colonial context
This article analyzes the views of 3 Dutch physicians working in the former Dutch East Indies during the first part of the 20th century. These physicians based ideas about the nature of the normal indigenous psyche on both their analysis of Indonesian individuals suffering from mental illness and on casual observations that represented widely shared cultural stereotypes. On that basis, they advocated a psychological colonial policy, which was to …
WAR & Military Mental Health
Involvement in warfare can have dramatic consequences for the mental health and well-being of military personnel. During the 20th century, US military psychiatrists tried to deal with these consequences while contributing to the military goal of preserving manpower and reducing the debilitating impact of psychiatric syndromes by implementing screening programs to detect factors that predispose individuals to mental disorders, providing early inte…
August Hollingshead and Frederick Redlich
SOCIAL CLASS AND MENTAL ILLNESS was the result of an unusually creative and productive collaborative research project undertaken by August Hollingshead, a sociologist, and Frederick Redlich, a psychiatrist. By combining their expertise in their respective disciplines, they became pioneers in the field of medical sociology, social psychiatry, and psychiatric epidemiology; their study is now considered a classic in these fields.1 The main conclusio…
War Neurosis, Adjustment Problems in Veterans, and an Ill Nation
After World War II, the confidence of American psychiatrists was at an all-time high as a result of their successful participation in the war. When the incidence of mental breakdown in the American armed forces rose to unprecedented heights, new and effective psychotherapeutic methods were developed to treat the traumatic effects of the extraordinary stresses of warfare. At the same time, social scientists concluded that breakdown incidence was i…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Psychology (21 works) · History (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Psychoanalysis (11 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (10 works) · Psychiatry (10 works)