Associate Professor Hans Pols

MA York University; PhD University of Pennsylvania
Room 435 Carslaw

+61 2 9351 3610

Hans Pols is interested in the history, sociology, and anthropology of medicine. He currently focuses on the history of colonial and postcolonial medicine in Southeast Asia. The history and sociology of psychiatry holds his special interest.

Current projects

Hans is currently engaged in a research project on the history of medicine in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia. He currently focuses on the roles Indonesian physicians have played in the social, cultural, and political movements in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia in the 1950s. He is also researching the nature of Indonesian herbal medicine or jamu and the way it relates to modern medicine.
Hans has a special interest in the history of psychiatry. He has published on the history of the American mental hygiene movement, the treatment of war neurosis in the armed forces of Australia, the UK, and the USA during World War II, and the history of colonial psychiatry.

Grants

• ARC Discovery Grant: Health and Medicine in the Dutch East Indies: Medical Research, Health Programs, and Colonial Networks of Mediation (2010-2012)
• ARC Discovery Grant: War, Trauma, and Rehabilitation: The Army, Psychiatry, and World War II [2004-2006]

Selected publications

Hans has published on the history of psychiatry, mental hygiene, child development, war neurosis, and the history of medicine in the Dutch East Indies.

• “Notes from Batavia, the European’s Graveyard: The 19th Century Debate on Acclimatization in the Dutch East Indies.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 1 (2012): 120-48.
• (with Warwick Anderson). “Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 93-113.
• “The Tunisian Campaign, War Neuroses, and the Reorientation of American Psychiatry During World War Ii.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 19, no. 6 (2011): 313-20.
• “The Totem Vanishes, the Hordes Revolt: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Indonesian Struggle for Independence.” In Globalizing the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, Sovereignties, edited by Warwick H. Anderson, Deborah Jenson and Richard Keller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 141-165.
• Beyond Clinical Frontiers: The American Mental Hygiene Movement, 1910-1945. International Relations in Psychiatry: Britain, Germany and the United States of America to World War Two. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press (2010): 111-133.
• Eugenics in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. New York: Oxford University Press (2010): 347-362.
• “European Botanists and Physicians, Indigenous Herbal Medicine in the Dutch East Indies, and Colonial Networks of Mediation” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 3, no.2-3 (2009): 173 - 208
• “The Nature of the Native Mind: Contested Views of Dutch Colonial Psychiatrists in the Former Dutch East Indies.” In Psychiatry and Empire, edited by Sloan Malone and Megan Vaughan. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, 172-196.
• “The Development of Psychiatry in Indonesia: From Colonial to Modern Times.” International Review of Psychiatry 18, no. 4 (2006): 363-70.
• “Between the Laboratory and Life: Child Development Research in Toronto, 1919-1956.” History of Psychology 5, no. 2 (2002): 135-62.
• “Divergences in American Psychiatry during the Depression: Somatic Psychiatry, Community Mental Hygiene, and Social Reconstruction.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37, no. 4 (2001): 369-88.

Areas of teaching and supervision

History of medicine, history of psychiatry, mental hygiene, mental health care, and colonial science and medicine.

Other professional contributions

Hans is editor of Health and History the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine.

Hans is editor of H-Madness, a blog on the history of psychiatry. Link: H-Madness