Race, Medicine, and Colonial Rule in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea

Abstract

Public health in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea shared characteristics with regimes in other colonial territories. The protection of European health and ensuring a supply of efficient indigenous labour were the principle aims of the public health regime. Measures to control infectious disease focused on racial segregation of urban spaces, surveillance, and control of indigenous mobility. Yet, if the mandate did not systemically encourage projects in preventive health and social medicine, wider public engagement with the international discourse of indigenous welfare and uplift surrounding it at times shaped colonial administration indirectly. One Director of Public Health in New Guinea, Raphael Cilento, invoked the terms of the mandate during acrimonious debates over nutrition in the 1920s that led to significant changes to rations included in the Native Labour Ordinance.