Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article argues that science was inextricably bound up with politics in the life and career of Tốn Thất Tùng. Nationalism motivated Tùng to join the Việt Minh fight against the French in the First Indochina War, but it was his colonial-era training as a surgeon that made him invaluable for the resistance. The widespread recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in 1954 gave Tùng, in turn, access to human and material resources that would not have been available otherwise. With these resources, including equipment and human livers, Tùng developed surgical techniques that enabled him to publish in internationally recognised journals. In return, Tùng trained doctors for the state, focusing on knowledge that helped the DRV battle the Republic of Vietnam’s and the United States’ (US) armies. During the 1960s, Tùng engaged in medical diplomacy that allowed those against US intervention, yet uncomfortable with DRV politics, to support the North. For his part, Tùng tapped into his far-flung network to access the latest medical advances as well as obtain training for his students. These developments, international and domestic, came together in Tùng’s struggle to identify and treat the effects of exposure to herbicides and their contaminant dioxin, popularly known as Agent Orange.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

(2008). The collectors of lost souls: Turning Kuru scientists into whitemen. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bayly

(2007). Asian voices in a post-colonial age: Vietnam, India and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bush

(1946). Endless horizons. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press.

C., K. (1965). Science chronicle: Vietnam at the Peking Scientific Symposium. Vietnamese Studies, 4(2), 145–151.

Đàng

T.T.

(2007). Last night I dreamed of peace: The diary of Dang Thuy Tram. New York: Harmony Books.

Edwards

P.N.

(1996). The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Elman

B.A.

(2007). New directions in the history of modern science in China: Global science and comparative history. Isis, 98(3), 517–523.

Fan

F.T.

(2007). Redrawing the map: Science in twentieth-century China. Isis, 98(3), 524–538.

Goscha

C.E.

(2011). Vietnam: Un Etat né de la guerre, 1945–1954 (Trans. Larcher

). Paris: A. Colin.

10.

Guénel

(2006). Tùng, Tốn Thất. In Bynum

W. F.

Bynum

(Eds), Dictionary of medical biography (pp. 1245–1247). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

11.

Kaiser

(2002). Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists after World War II. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 33(1), 131–159.

12.

Krige

Barth

K.-H.

(2006). Science, technology, and international affairs: New perspectives. In Krige

Barth

K.-H.

(Eds), Global power knowledge: Science and technology in international affairs (pp. 1–21). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

13.

Krivine

J.-M.

(2005). Carnets de missions au Vietnam, 1967–1987: Des maquis au ‘socialisme de marché’. Paris: Indes savantes.

14.

Leslie

(1993). The Cold War and American science: The military-industrial-academic complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press.

15.

Martini

E.A.

(2012). Agent Orange: History, science, and the politics of uncertainty. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

16.

Mukerji

(1989). A fragile power: Scientists and the state. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

17.

Ninh

N.B. (2002). A world transformed: The politics of culture in revolutionary Vietnam, 1945–1965. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

18.

Peking’s [Beijing’s] Scientific Symposium: A preview. (1964). Open Society Archives at Central European University.

19.

Phạm

K.N.

(2011). Trung – Triều Nhật Ký’—Một Tài Liệu Lịch Sử Vô Cùng Quý Giá. In Nguyễn

V.H.

Mai

P.N.

Phạm

K.N.

Nguyễn

T. T.

(Eds), Di Sản Ký Ức của Nhà Khoa Học (pp. 221–225). Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Tri Thức [Hanoi and Knowledge Publishers].

20.

Quarterly chronicle and documentation. (1964). The China Quarterly, 20, 171–187.

21.

Tsing

A.L.

(2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

22.

Tùng

T.T.

(1939). La vascularisation veineuse du foie et ses applicaitons aux résections et lobectomies hépatiques. Hanoi: Faculté de Médecine.

23.

Tùng

T.T.

(1945). Chirurgie des pancréatites aiguës. Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient.

24.

Tùng

T.T.

(1962). Chirurgie d’exérèse du foie. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

25.

Tùng

T.T.

(1973, 15 August). Nhân Dân.

26.

Tùng

T.T.

(1978). Dường Vào Khoa Học của Tôi. Hanoi: NXB Thanh Nien.

27.

Tùng

T.T.

(1979). Les résections majeures et mineures du foie. Paris: Masson.

28.

Tung

T.T.

Quang

N.D.

(1963). A new technique for operating on the liver. The Lancet, 281(7274), 192–193.

29.

Wahlberg

(2012). Family secrets and the industrialisation of herbal medicine in postcolonial Vietnam. In Monnais-Rousselot

Thompson

C.M.

Wahlberg

(Eds), Southern medicine for southern people: Vietnamese medicine in the making (pp. 153–178). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher.

30.

Zierler

(2011). The invention of ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the scientists who changed the way we think about the environment. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

31.

Zimmerman

(1971). Peoples science projects for Vietnam. Science for the People, 3(2), 25–27.

The Itinerary of a North Vietnamese Surgeon: Medical Science and Politics during the Cold War

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References