Abstract
In French-ruled Hanoi, as in many other colonies, the colonial state’s healthcare policies played a central role in the construction of the colonial order.¹The white colonizers were perpetually anxious about the state of their health and the omnipresent threat of tropical disease. Hanoi’s busy hospitals and graveyards darkened the white experience in the city.² Despite attempts to use gallows humor to alleviate their angst and the access to the very comfortable lifestyle they enjoyed as the conquering elite, the collective obsession with disease exposed white vulnerability in the tropics; a vulnerability which political, military and economic force could not erase.³