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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Profile: Tôn Thất Tùng

This side path is organized around the life and work of one of the most famous Vietnamese medical doctors, Tôn Thất Tùng. Tùng trained as a liver surgeon and is best known for developing a liver surgery technique. Wartime conditions and state-building needs, however, meant DRV medical doctors had no choice but to focus on military medicine (Goscha 2011). Moreover, the lack of equipment and personnel especially during the early years of the war forced Vietnamese medical personnel to find innovative solutions, including the use of a bicycle to generate electricity for field hospitals.

In late 1946, Tùng left Hanoi to join the resistance in Chiêm Hóa in northern Vietnam, where he and other medical doctors operated a mobile hospital and medical school. Working effectively, Tùng became vice minister of health in 1948. Tùng's role in the Việt Minh's military medical corps and ministry of health of meant that he played an important role in investigating suspected instances of germ warfare during the First Indochina War. In fact, he spent much of the 1950s through the 1980s researching the effects of various forms of environmental warfare and fighting its use.

Over his long career, Tùng made the transition from mapping the health of individual human bodies to mapping the health of the Vietnamese geobody. First diseases caused by poverty during the colonial era and then diseases caused by environmental warfare during the Cold War encouraged Tùng to link the study of bodies and structures. As a medical doctor, Tùng realized that he could not heal his patients without thinking sociologically, historically, and spatially, i.e. without mapping invasions.

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Mapping Invasion: Vietnamese Responses to Biological Warfare During the First Indochina War
This module analyzes Vietnamese responses to the French military's possible use of biological warfare during the First Indochina War (1946-1954). Beginning in 1952, the Việt Minh, the anti-colonial popular front forces led by Ho Chi Minh, collected reports of French airplanes releasing powders, worm-infested leaflets, and other strange substances over Việt Minh-controlled territory in and around the Red River Delta. These reports assumed that the strange substances were biological weapons, including insects and microbes meant either to sicken or kill humans directly or to infect plants and animals and threaten the Vietnamese food supply. Such reports lasted until at least the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.
This module argues that Vietnamese responses to biological warfare were inherently spatial. They depended, for example, on mapping information gathered from dispersed sources, from conferences held in China to surveys of farmers in the Red River Delta. Moreover, this intellectual geography overlapped, and existed in tension, with a political geography of civilizations, regions, and nation-states, an emotional geography of fear, and a medical geography that linked airplanes, environments, microbes, and humans. Unpacking the (non) event of biological warfare shows, in turn, how responses to biological weapons had complicated effects on Vietnamese spatial imaginaries. From a Vietnamese perspective, germ warfare helped place northern Vietnam in reconfigured Sinosphere and borderland relationships and created newer nationalist and revolutionary worlds. In other words, this period shows a mix of old and new maps being used to understand new hybrid environments of microbial, human, and machine movement.
To make maps useful for combatting biological warfare, the Việt Minh had to understand conditions in local places at specific moments. Moving from generalized knowledge about the Sinosphere to specific knowledge about places in the Red River Delta took hard work. This module seeks to trace and, in a limited way, reproduce the labor needed to map the mobilities and immobilities of invasion. In other words, the structure of this module mimics the movement from general to specific, and old to new, and the intellectual and physical labor needed to make such a move. Such a structure encourages users to reflect on how historical actors moved between scales that were different in quantity and in quality, shifting between different geographic scales—global, regional, national, and local—and different types of maps—civilizational, emotional, and biogeographical. In other words, this module examines what certain Vietnamese thought about biological warfare and to explain what those actors thought with and how these structures changed over time.
This module is divided into three pathways, each of which explores a different theme in biological warfare. Path A is called "Learning from the Korean War." It encourages users to explores communist charges of biological warfare in North Korea and northeast China leveled against the United States military. It examines notes from a Vietnamese delegation to an international conference about biological warfare along with Chinese posters produced as part of a patriotic hygiene movement. A side path shows how northern Vietnam has been incorporated into various spatial imaginaries. Path B is called "Surveying Northern Vietnam." It encourages users to explore biological warfare in northern Vietnam during the First Indochina War. Drawing from reports of the Committee to Prevent Germs, this path traces the steps that the Việt Minh took to produce knowledge about biological warfare. A side path explores the life of one of the committee's leaders, the famous Vietnamese medical doctor Tôn Thất Tùng. Finally, this path offers a Google map of a few suspected incidents of biological weapons use drawn from the committee's work and other Việt Minh reports. Path C is called "Preparing for Biological Warfare." Such efforts included included producing and distributing a pamphlet meant to popularize knowledge about the history of American and Japanese use of biological weapons. This pamphlet sought to mobilize domestic Vietnamese audiences to fight. It aimed as well to show international audiences the Vietnamese connections to the communist revolutions that had taken place in China and Korea. Finally, the Việt Minh organized a Vietnamese Patriotic Hygiene Movement modeled on the Chinese Patriotic Hygiene Movement.

Click here for a list of references for this module, which is also available from the module's Conclusion page.
Education
The Việt Minh viewed education and propaganda as another key to countering biological warfare. Starting in the 1950s, they published several pamphlets and booklets on the subject, ranging from histories of biological weapons to manuals for medical doctors on how to deal with germs, insects, and other threats. Copies of several of these publications are still held in the Vietnam National Library. In addition to circulating printed material, there were no doubt word-of-mouth campaigns.
To the right is the cover of one undated educational pamphlet about biological warfare in Korea and China published by the military medical corps of the Việt Minh (Nhân Dân Triều Trung Chiến Thắng Chiến Tranh vi Trùng, 19??).
Who seems to have been the audience(s) for this pamphlet? What languages does it contain? What kinds of images?
The pamphlet shows the imagined geography of imperialist and non-imperialist nations and their relationship to invasion. In the lower right of the panel, a man who represents imperialist enemies seems to be on the run. Next to him is a bomb buried in the ground with insects and bugs escaping from it. In the upper right, two airplanes appear to be streaking downwards, black smoke trailing from them. On the left, a syringe and a bayonet blade are pointed menacingly at the imperialist, his bomb, and his airplanes. These tools, of medicine and the military, protect factories and grain harvests below. Thus, the Chinese and North Korean people were, as the title of the pamphlet proclaims, able to defeat imperialists germ warfare.
Even though the Việt Minh quietly shelved their charges of germ warfare against the French, this pamphlet offers insights into the fears of biological warfare circulating among intellectuals and elites and to a lesser degree the broader populace. As Shellen Wu notes in her discussion of Xing An in the early twentieth century, the “educated elite from around the world increasingly spoke a common language of science and the social sciences.” The Việt Minh, and their medical cadre including Tôn Thất Tùng, spoke such a language to popularize knowledge about environmental warfare among both commoners and elite and to convince them of the threat of biological invasions. This pamphlet drew on information obtained at the end of 1952 and the beginning of 1953 in China. You can scroll over the title page for a translation and consider how the pamphlet's content reflected similar themes to those on Chinese propaganda posters from the Korean War.
Learning From China and North Korea 2 gallery 2021-01-20T16:50:35-05:00 Michitake Aso
The Việt Minh were careful observers of the Korean War (1950-1953). The Việt Minh quickly understood the implications when the North Koreans and Chinese charged the United Nations military, led by the United States, of using biological weapons. In December 1952 and January 1953, Việt Minh representatives attended a series of lectures and an exhibition where they learned the specifics of biological weapons use in Chinese and North Korea. You’ve read a simplified version of this information in the pamphlet in Path 1 but the reports collected at this time were extremely detailed and the transcripts and summaries run to over 200 pages.
Chinese scientists and medical doctors emphasized the need for careful research and laid out three reasons they suspected the US of using germ warfare:
1. Diseases that broke out were new to area and time of year;
2. Unusual insects and materials served as vectors;
3. Outbreaks happened after US airplanes flew by.
They also pointed to the context of the US biological weapons program and borrowed the term “bacteriology upside down” from Theodore Rosebury, a key player in start of US biological weapons program and later published a warning about them. Finally, these reports argue that patriotic hygiene mass movement was a good way to counter effects of biological warfare. All of these themes were picked up by the Việt Minh in their own investigations (NAV3 BYT 5402).
Explore the NIH posters shown above and compare them to the Việt Minh images that were used to educate Vietnamese about the use of biological weapons and how to resist them. While these posters emphasize human diseases, pathogens and pests attacking agricultural production were an equal concern for the Chinese, North Koreans, and Việt Minh.
Tôn Thất Tùng was again a key player as he traveled to China and North Korea in July 1951 with Hoàng Quốc Việt. Tùng arrived in Peking (Beijing) on 28 July and proceeded to carry out both political and medical exchanges. Tùng next visited the Democratic Republic of Korea. In August 1951, the fighting on the Korean peninsula was intense and Tùng witnessed the regular bombings of Pyongyang. He noted in his diary how the residents of Pyongyang had come to know the schedule of what he called 'American' bombs. Tùng's observations of life in North Korea were eerily similar to later accounts of life in Hanoi during the US bombings of the 1960s. Tùng left at the end of 1951 before the charges of US germ warfare and his training as a surgeon would not have shed much light on biological weapons. He did, however, serve as the chair at the first meeting of the Committee to Prevent Germs (Ban Chống Trùng) held from September 12 through 16, 1952.