The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has produced two different narratives in India. One, here described as "historical," looks back to the pandemics of the colonial past-bubonic plague from 1896, influenza in 1918-19-as a source of comparisons, lessons, and dire warnings for the present. This narrative envisages the reenactment of past scenes, including flight from the cities, victimization of the poor, and the questioning of state authority. The other narrative, here called "insurgent," questions the value of historical analogies, doubts that history ever substantially repeats itself, and stresses the specificity of postcolonial Indian politics and health. While recognizing the validity of both narratives, the author urges caution in employing colonial history to critique contemporary events and, while recognizing the 1890s plague as a watershed moment, questions whether even the most devastating pandemics (such as 1918's influenza) necessarily result in profound social, political, and health care changes.

Public health in China has become a global concern as a consequence of the outbreak and worldwide spread of COVID-19. This article examines the historical place of China in international and global health. Contrary to prevalent narratives in the history of medicine, China and Chinese historical actors played key roles in this field throughout the twentieth century. Several episodes illustrate this argument: the Qing organization of the International Plague Conference in 1911; the role of China in the work of the interwar League of Nations Health Organization and postwar establishment of the World Health Organization; Cold War medical diplomacy; and Chinese models of primary health care during the 1970s. These case studies together show that Chinese physicians and administrators helped shape concepts and practices of "global health" even before that term rose to prominence in the 1990s, and current events are best understood in the context of this history.

This essay provides a critical observation of the South Korean government's distinctive management of COVID-19 with particular reference to the state of emergency. It reveals that the success of South Korea's handling of the pandemic is largely attributed by a majority of Western media to the efficient deployment of both information and communication technologies and Confucian collectivism, two components that seem contradictory yet not incompatible under the rubric of techno-Orientalism. Analyzing the intensification of surveillance and the rapid datafication of society, this essay argues that the current state of emergency is not a breakdown of normality but a continuation of the state of crisis and disaster that rules a developing country like South Korea. In doing so, the essay seeks to facilitate a critical discussion about a new mode of democracy in the era of pandemic that increasingly grapples with tensions between individual freedom and public health.

In March 2020, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, the Tokyo Olympic Organising Committee, and the International Olympic Committee postponed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for one year. The delay is the most prominent consequence of the COVID-19 crisis in Japan thus far. But the "Corona Calamity" is bigger than the Olympics. The totality of the disaster is impossible to capture. The very thing that makes it a calamity are the myriad rhythms of crisis that intersect at COVID-19. If there is a shared theme to be found in these rhythms, it is the question of recovery. When will it happen? What will it look like? And what, exactly, will we recover? In what follows, I share three rhythms of crisis and recovery: national history, the tourism industry, and the parcel delivery industry.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government, led by Narendra Modi, imposed a stringent lockdown with only four hours notice. It paid no attention to the millions of migrants who work on a temporary basis in Indian cities. Most lost their livelihoods as a result of the lockdown, and millions sought to return to their native villages. At the same time, the rural economy confronted its own difficulties caused by the lockdown. The relief that the Modi government offered to the large numbers of poor people who had been adversely affected by its response to COVID-19 was limited and poorly delivered. The episode showed the lack of responsiveness of Indian democracy to the needs of working people and the failures of development. Yet Modi's particular brand of authoritarian populism worked so well that a government displaying very little compassion retained strong popular support.

The COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near over. Some things, however, seem relatively clear. So far, the agendas of the world's most powerful actors seem unchanged-or, indeed, accelerated. Partly as a result, disease mortality and economic losses have fallen largely on poorer people, though deaths so far have been concentrated among poorer people in rich countries. Consequently, the pandemic's implications look very different at the local, subnational, and international levels-although at all levels, they thus far reflect accelerations of preexisting trends more than new departures. Many developments reflect remarkable gains in human capacity to cope with disasters-a point highlighted by comparisons to the 1919 flu and other historical events pandemics made by the authors in this forum. Those gains are particularly evident in Asia, though they look more precarious in South Asia and Southeast Asia than in East Asia; this has contributed to a marked shift in rhetoric about global "sickness" and health and seems consistent with prophecies of a coming "Asian century." However, COVID-19 may not be a singular event like 1919 but may portend a wave of environmental emergencies; in that scenario, no world region has exhibited as much resilience as it would need.

In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Said's interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by his trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Said's advocacy of Eastern Medicine provides a way to think about the history of medicine and medical revitalization that is not limited by colonial, postcolonial, or nationalist assumptions and priorities.

This paper addresses the development of scholastic medical traditions in Tibet through an extension of lists of physicians. I consider the debates that such lists and their accompanying narratives engender for Tibetan historians and reflect on the contributions they make to the identity of the medical tradition. By examining the structure and content of classificatory methods in medical histories, I argue that temporally organized lists document the place of medicine across time, geographically organized lists document the reach of medical knowledge across space, and thematically organized lists document the intertwining of medical knowledge and skill with other aspects of intellectual and civil life. In making these lists, medical historians paint a portrait of the Tibetan medical tradition that evokes connections to Buddhism and the strength and cosmopolitanism of the imperial period. Medical histories thus emphasize a picture of Tibet in the broader context of Asia- a Tibet whose empire lives on culturally or intellectually, if not militarily.

The historical study of Western medicine in nineteenth-century Siam has emphasized the dichotomy between Western medicine and traditional Thai medical practice. The former is often represented as a monolith, and the epistemological transformation of Western medicine during the nineteenth century is glossed over without sufficient attention. Pasteurian medicine, especially the idea of germs, was introduced to Siam by the American missionary Dan Beach Bradley. Its introduction spurred a process of negotiation with both pre-Pasteurian Western and traditional Thai medicine. In its pre-Pasteurian and Pasteurian variants, Western medicine was constituted as a new medical practice and disciplinary regime in Siam. As a discursive instrument of state hegemony, the ideas, structures, policies, and institutions of Western medicine furthered the understanding and management of virulent epidemics, the institution of the sanitary system, the shaping of new concepts of population and a healthy workforce, and not least, the framing of a medicalizing project to police people's bodies pursued by the Thai state in the 1930s.

This article examines the market for cocaine in India during the early twentieth century and the efforts of the colonial state to control it. The British authorities issued regulations to prohibit the drug's use as early as 1900, and yet by the start of World War I, cocaine's appeal had become socially diverse and geographically wide. This account of a significant market for a powerful new drug suggests that Indian society was able to rapidly develop a demand for such products even when the colonial state had no part in their introduction. Indians used these new products in complex ways- as medicines, as tonics, and as intoxicants, albeit through the localized medium of the everyday paan leaf. The study points to a reconsideration of a number of debates about the history of drugs and modern medicines in Asia.