In the early 20th century, the Netherlands East Indies was awash with revivalist and reformist movements. These included Christian missionaries seeking to overcome the failures and frustrations of the previous century and Muslim reformists seeking to reform their faith to meet the political, epistemological, and moral challenges of colonial modernity. Both looked to a common resource in pursuit of reform and revival: modern medicine and the medical body. Although often recognizing this convergence of religious and medical modernity among Muslims and Christians in late colonial Indonesia, historians have done very little to examine critically the role that health, medicine, and the medical body played in these projects or the many differences that existed in their appropriations and uses of modern medical discourse and practice. This talk attempts to address these historiographical gaps. It specifically examines how Protestant missionaries and Muslim reformers in Central Java used medical discourse and practice—especially questions of physiology and etiology—to pursue wider ethical, epistemological, and devotional projects of modernity. In doing so, it considers how Protestant and Muslim reformers theologized modernity from conditions of the flesh.

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