Healing Traditions and Medicinal Products in the Market of Health, Healing, Beauty, and Vigor in the Dutch East Indies

Most historians investigating the medical market in colonial Southeast Asia have focused on two incompatible medical traditions: western and traditional medicine. They thereby overlook various other medical traditions that were present as well as the way medical traditions are selectively combined and transformed by healers, carers, and sick individuals. The medical marketplace in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia offered a wide range of suppliers who sold medications, cures, and approaches from multiple local and international sources. This can be seen most clearly by analyzing what pharmacists offered and in the magazines they published to advertise the goods they sold. It is necessary to analyze medicine and healing from the perspective of everyday people and the pills, potions, and elixirs they bought to alleviate their illnesses and promote their health.