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Morbid Subjects: Forensic medicine and sovereignty in Siam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2017

QUENTIN (TRAIS) PEARSON
QUENTIN (TRAIS) PEARSON*
Affiliation:
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States of America Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines the question of Siamese sovereignty in the era of high imperialism through the lens of medical jurisprudence. Although Siam (Thailand) was never formally colonized, it was subject to unequal trade treaties that established extraterritorial legal rights for foreign residents. In cases where a foreign resident was suspected of having harmed a Siamese subject, the Siamese state had to appeal to foreign consular officials to file charges against the suspect. Standards of forensic evidence were crucial in such cases. While medical jurisprudence helped to bolster racial privilege in other colonial legal jurisdictions, this article argues that these disputes rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents and their political representatives. The dead bodies of Siamese subjects became grounds for challenging foreign courts and asserting Siamese sovereignty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , March 2018 , pp. 394 - 420
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Until 1939, the nation-state Thailand was known as Siam. I will refer to Thailand and its population as Siam and Siamese, respectively.

2 See, for example, Harding, A. J., ‘The eclipse of the astrologers: King Mongkut, his successors, and the reformation of law in Thailand’, in Examining Practice, Interrogating Theory: Comparative Legal Studies in Asia, Nicholson, P. and Biddulph, S. (eds), Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden, 2008, pp. 307–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hooker, M. B., ‘The “Europeanization” of Siam's law 1855-1908’, in The Laws of South-East Asia, Volume II: European Laws in South-East Asia, Hooker, M. B. (ed.), Butterworths, St Paul, MN, 1988, pp. 531–607Google Scholar. Unequal trade treaties establishing extraterritorial legal privileges were signed with Britain (1855), the United States of America (1856), France (1856), Denmark (1858), and ten other European nation-states, as well as Japan (1898); see Loos, T., Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2006, p. 43Google Scholar. These rights were gradually extinguished, first for foreign nationals of Asian ethnicity (beginning in 1907), and later for other foreign nationals beginning in 1917; see Toynbee, A. J., Survey of International Affairs 1929, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1930Google Scholar.

3 Loos, Subject Siam, pp. 29–71.

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5 Loos, Subject Siam, pp. 72–99.

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8 Burney, I. A., Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1926, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000, pp. 23–8Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., pp. 16–51.

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13 Loos, Subject Siam, pp. 42–4; Lysa, Hong, ‘Extraterritoriality in Bangkok in the reign of King Chulalongkorn, 1868–1910: the cacophonies of semi-colonial cosmopolitanism’, Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History, vol. 27, no. 2, 2003, pp. 125–46Google Scholar.

14 Chandran, J., ‘British foreign policy and the extraterritorial question in Siam, 1891–1900’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 38, no. 2, 1965, p. 290Google Scholar.

15 The following account of the trial proceedings relies on Bangkok Times [BT], 6 August 1892.

16 Of course, it should be noted that these standards were themselves of relatively recent provenance in the British legal context. Vanessa McMahan argues that, until well into the eighteenth century, ‘Most medical evidence in [English] criminal trials was provided by unqualified lay witnesses, who relied on their everyday experience of bodies for their opinions’; see her ‘Reading the body: dissection and the “murder” of Sarah Stout, Hertfordshire, 1699’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 19, no. 1, 2006, pp. 19–35, p. 22.

17 Trial by jury was itself a facet of the British legal system without precedent in a Siamese legal context.

18 Here Michell perhaps relied upon Norman Chevers's canonical text on medical jurisprudence; Chevers notes that, ‘In commencing his search for the cause of death in any case where the operation of violence is suspected, the Surgeon must determine to satisfy himself upon three points’, namely whether the injury was itself mortal, whether the deceased suffered from any preexisting ‘organic disease of any important organ’, and finally, the extent to which the death could be said to be the result of the injury, the disease, or a combination of both. Chevers further specifies that ‘intemperate persons suffering from organic disease’ of the organs in the abdominal cavity are more susceptible to hemorrhage from relatively slight injury, and that this condition was exacerbated—for Europeans and indigenous people alike—by exposure to environmental hazards (‘marsh poison’) in habitation in tropical climes; see Chevers, N., A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for Bengal and the North-Western Provinces, F. Carbery, Calcutta, 1856, pp. 358–9Google Scholar.

19 Q. A. Pearson, ‘Bodies politic: civil law & forensic medicine in colonial era Bangkok’, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2014, pp. 179–89.

20 Phongpaichit, P. and Baker, C., Thailand: Economy and Politics, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. 95–107Google Scholar.

21 See, for example, Skinner, W. G., Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1957Google Scholar; and V. Koompirocana, ‘Siam in British foreign policy, 1855–1938: the acquisition and the relinquishment of British extra-territorial rights’, PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 1972, pp. 109–24.

22 French missionaries, for instance, attempted to use their extraterritorial status to try and build communities of Catholics that existed outside of Siamese jurisdiction. Shane Strate argues that these efforts were not integrated with official state policy until after 1893; see Strate, S., The Lost Territories: Thailand's History of National Humiliation, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2015, pp. 67–71Google Scholar.

23 Chandran, ‘British foreign policy’, p. 300. Only 381 of these had been born in Siam, the vast majority being immigrants from territories under the authority of the Government of British India. ‘Asiatic’ British subjects quickly came to outnumber those of British birth; by 1902, there were 2,198 Asiatic British subjects recognized by the British Consulate in Bangkok, no more than 350 of whom were of European provenance; see Lysa, H., ‘“Stranger within the gates”: knowing semi-colonial Siam as extraterritorials’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 2004, pp. 327–54, p. 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 BT, 28 August 1896. Not long after, one particular case of false registration would provoke the ire of the English-language press in Bangkok: a man named Kadir (alias Nai Day [sic]), the son of a Siamese official, was able to register himself as a (Cambodian) French protégé while working as captain of a French vessel (BT, 11 September 1896).

25 Chandran, ‘British foreign policy’, p. 303; Strate, The Lost Territories, pp. 32–3.

26 Chandran, ‘British foreign policy’, p. 295.

27 Evidence suggests that this was indeed the explicit strategy of the French for confronting what they perceived to be British predominance in Siam; see the words of the French Minister at Bangkok quoted in Strate, The Lost Territories, p. 32.

28 Ironically, although British officials in Siam and in London were fixated on the threat of the increasing numbers of French protégés in Siam, the British had far more foreign subjects in Siam than the French (Chandran, ‘British foreign policy’, p. 300). This demographic anomaly, however, was likely outweighed by the French tendency to assert their privileges according to the most liberal reading of the treaties.

29 A telegram (# 10565, dated 17 December 1896) sent from London to the Siamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs provides concrete evidence of ongoing discussion concerning this precise issue (see NA R5 M.5.1ข/6). Chandran argues that this softening of the imperial stance was in part due to the perceived threat of German imperial designs on the Malay Peninsula (‘British foreign policy’, p. 294).

30 Brailey, The Satow Siam Papers, pp. 106–10.

31 Chandran, ‘British foreign policy’, p. 297

32 Ibid., p. 292.

33 This was not an unqualified relinquishing of extraterritorial rights, but it was a step towards greater jurisdictional sovereignty for Siam; see Iijima, A., ‘The “international court” system in the colonial history of Siam’, Taiwan Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2008, pp. 31–64Google Scholar.

34 Hong, ‘Extraterritoriality in Bangkok’, p. 126.

35 When it came to legal matters in British India, for example, complexion mattered. Jordanna Bailkin has argued that, although ‘The judicial methods for establishing the racial identity (and thus the legal privileges) of defendants’ in British imperial courts ‘were never systematic’, ‘The defendant's plea that he was a European British subject was accepted by the High Court if it were satisfied by his physical appearance that his claim was true’ (‘The boot and the spleen’, p. 473).

36 Stoler, A. L., ‘Rethinking colonial categories’, in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Stoler, A. L. (ed.), University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002, pp. 22–40, p. 24, emphasis in originalGoogle Scholar.

37 Contemporary observers were already attentive to racial difference in death; a typical report in the Bangkok Times, for instance, notes: ‘The dead body of a fair-skinned female child was seen floating in the river, past Messrs Kiam Hoa Heng's, yesterday’ (BT, 16 May 1898). Corpses were commonly identified as ‘Chinese’ as well, perhaps by the telltale queue hairstyle that was a sign of allegiance to the Qing Dynasty (see, for example, BT, 23 August 1893; BT, 18 May 1895; BT, 9 June 1898; BT, 3 February 1899).

38 This situation should not be dismissed as an historical anomaly: in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, recovery workers initially separated ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ corpses, which were subjected to vastly different identification procedures. See Merli, C. and Buck, T., ‘Forensic identification and identity politics in 2004 post-Tsunami Thailand: negotiating dissolving boundaries’, Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, more briefly, Pearson, Q. (Trais), ‘Dead body politics: forensic medicine and sovereignty in Siam’, Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, vol. 16, September 2014Google Scholar, http://kyotoreview.org/yav/dead-body-politics-forensic-medicine-and-sovereignty-in-siam/, [accessed 21 August 2017].

39 ‘Duai thuk wan ni mak ja mi khadi khwam thi khon nai bangkhap tang prathet kha khon fai sayam tai boi boi khon fai sayam tong pen jot fong khwam yang san kong sun hai phijarana tam nangsue sanya’ (NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1).

40 By this time, it was generally understood that the Siamese would have to adopt a system of law modelled on Western principles, codes, and institutions before the issue of extraterritorial rights would be re-examined by European powers (Loos, Subject Siam, pp. 43–5, 107). This logic is likewise clear in earlier scholarship on Siamese legal reform; see, for example, Thornely, P. W., The History of a Transition, Siam Observer Press, Bangkok, 1923, p. 119Google Scholar.

41 ‘Fai kong sun tat sin khadi doi kotmai nana prathet mai fang ao kham chanasut phlik sop khong phanak ngan amphoe pen lakthan phro wa mai sap akan chat wa tai duai het prakan dai’ (NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1).

42 ‘Tha khwam ruang dai fai sayam mai dai hai phaet truat chanasut pha sop jaeng akan thi tai nan laeo kong sun ko yok khwam sia’ (ibid.).

43 ‘Pen kan-thi khon fai sayam sia priap khon tang prathet yu’ (ibid.).

44 The terms recur, sometimes with slight variation including references to Thai people (khon thai, as opposed to khon or fai sayam), in the correspondence as evidenced below.

45 NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1, letter dated 7 December 1892.

46 Riggs, F. W., Thailand: The Modernization of a Bureaucratic Polity, East-West Center, Honolulu, 1966, p. 117Google Scholar.

47 In the coming years, the oversight of ecclesiastical matters would take a secondary role to education and, in 1902, the Ministry of Religious Affairs (krasuang thammakan) would become the Ministry of Education/Public Instruction (krasuang sueksathikan); see Wyatt, D. K., The Politics of Reform in Thailand: Education in the Reign of King Chulalongkorn, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1969, p. 234Google Scholar.

48 BT, 1 April 1893. The very fact that Hays was American might have also helped elevate him as a candidate in the eyes of the Siamese. Unlike the British and French, America was deemed to be a neutral foreign power without territorial designs on Siam. Tamara Loos has explored this rationale behind the appointment of the crucial role of the general adviser to His Majesty of Siam's Government—a position that, from 1892 to 1949, was filled almost exclusively by Americans—most with ties to Harvard University (Loos, Subject Siam, pp. 53–4).

49 ‘Mo he [Hays] dai rap ngoen duean pen mo nai krom phayaban khuan pen na thi chanasut sop tam het thi krom phayaban pen na thi samrap raksa khai jep khong mahachon nan’ (NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1, letter dated 7 December 1892).

50 NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1, letter dated 16 December 1892.

51 ‘Nak rian rong rian phaetyakon thi mi khwam-ru phuea ja tham kan dai ko mi yu lai khon khuan ja hai nak rian pai truat pha sop tam thi krasuang mueang kho ma’ (ibid.).

52 Although traditional Siamese legal codes such as the Law of the Three Seals contained elaborate discussions of evidence, including the rules pertaining to potential witnesses, the first formal law of evidence composed according to Western models was not promulgated until February 1895 (BT, 14 February 1895).

53 ‘Tha pen kan-yai kan-samkhan ja hai mo he [Hays] rue phaet yurop khon nueng khon dai pai chuai truat’ (NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1, letter dated 17 December 1892).

54 ‘Mai jam pho tae khon tang prathet kha khon thai yang diao thueng phrai fa pra ratchakon duai kan’ (ibid.).

55 Nai Chum, among the inaugural students at the Royal Medical College, cited (and reproduced) his contract when he attempted to appeal his first civil service assignment after graduation in March 1893 (NA R5 S.Th. 8/1).

56 Day, T. and Reynolds, C. J., ‘Cosmologies, truth regimes, and the state in Southeast Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger with F. Lawrence, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989, pp. 27–56Google Scholar. For a critical exploration of this model in the Thai historical context, see Limaphichart, T., ‘The emergence of the Siamese public sphere: colonial modernity, print culture, and the practice of criticism (1860s–1910s)’, South East Asia Research, vol. 17, no. 3, 2009, pp. 361–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Burney, Bodies of Evidence, pp. 16–51.

59 Cf. Latour, B., ‘When things strike back: a possible contribution of “science studies” to the social sciences’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, 2000, pp. 107–23, p. 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 ‘Phu thi pha truat sop ja pen phaet thai rue phaet yurop ko dai khap pha jao mai mi khwam-rang kiat sing dai loei tae phaet phu thi ja truat pha nan tong pen phaet thi mi khwam-ru pho thi ja bok het haeng akan tai hai san kong sun tang prathet chua thao nan’ (NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1, letter dated 14 January 1893).

61 ‘Phuea mi hai kong sun yok het khuen tad sin khwam haeng akan tai dang chen thi khoei tat sin hai yok khwam sia’ (ibid.).

62 Naret refers to such documents as ‘a report of the findings of the autopsy’ (nangsue rai ngan jaeng khwam tam het thi truat dai). The notion of a formal medico-legal document recording the cause of death, a death certificate, had apparently not yet entered the lexicon of Siamese officials. It would soon appear (in transliteration) in the inquest files compiled by Siamese police once formal autopsies began in May 1896 (Pearson, ‘Bodies politic’, pp. 255–65).

63 ‘Hai tham rai ngan jaeng khwam tam het thi truat dai’ (NA R5 S.Th. 8.2.ฉ/1, letter dated 7 December 1892).

64 NA R5 S.Th. 8/9.

65 The victim in this case exhibits what a layman today might recognize as classic symptoms of brain trauma (concussion) as the result of a blow to the head. The physicians, however, attributed the death to illness and not the wounds sustained during the altercation (NA R5 S.Th. 8/9).

66 Afterwards, Hays resumed his demands for extra compensation for performing the autopsy (NA R5 S.Th. 8/9, letter dated 4 June 1893).

67 Although Naret accepted Hays's judgement in the case, he nevertheless criticized his forensic investigation and the knowledge it produced as not worth the expense (‘Khran ja jang hai mo he [Hays] pha sop ko pen ngoen mak nak hen wa prayot thi ja dai sap mai thao kan-thi ja sia ngoen’; ibid.).

68 ‘Jam tong rip jad kan ruang phaet truat sop hai pen thi man khong sia jueng ja di tha mai rip jad mi het to pai na ja sia kan’ (NA R5 S.Th. 8/9, letter dated 4 June 1893, p. 2).

69 NA R5 S.Th. 8/9, 1. Damrong Phaetyakhun (Chuen Phuthaphaet, 1881–1953), was later elevated in rank to Phraya (1923), and served as the first Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University (1947–50).

70 NA R5 S.Th. 8/9, 4; letter dated two days later, on 6 June 1893.

71 ‘Hen duai klao wa luang damrong thueng rien phaet dai nangsue samkhan ko jing tae pen kha thun la ong thuli phrabat pen khon thai’ (ibid.).

72 Kusiak, P., ‘Instrumentalized rationality, cross-cultural mediators, and civil epistemologies of late colonialism’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 40, no. 6, 2010, pp. 871–902, p. 873CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Fahmy, K., ‘The anatomy of justice: forensic medicine and criminal law in nineteenth century Egypt’, Islamic Law & Society, vol. 6, no. 2, 1999, pp. 224–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 In this respect, the implementation of forensic science by the Siamese state might be regarded as an instance of ‘counter-forensics’ (an idea attributed to Allan Sekula), whereby forensic approaches are deployed to ‘frustrate or prevent’ the ‘scientific investigation of . . . objects’ and their presentation as ‘evidence in legal proceedings’; see Keenan, T., ‘Photography and counter-forensics’, Grey Room, vol. 55, Spring 2014, pp. 58–77, p. 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thanks to Mónica Salas-Landa for suggesting this connection.

75 Burney, Bodies of Evidence.