7 - Medicines as Vectors of Modernization and Medicalization

Summary

To explore the question of whether, and how, the popularity of (some) colonial medicines participated in the modernization and medicalization of Vietnamese society, we first turn to the media. Interwar Vietnam’s prolific and vibrant popular press both reflected and shaped a self-conscious quest for modernity. It described, and stimulated, the role of medicines in this quest. Indeed, the media was not simply an arena for marketing pharmaceutical efficacy; it also presented health as modern, as an individual right and responsibility, as well as a consumer good. Yet modernity brought both new imperatives and new obstacles – through overwork, stress, and lack of time – to the management of one’s health. Medicines offered solutions. Modernity and medicines thus converged in several ways.