Jamu and The Fever: Two Books on What Counts as Proof — Epoche B1
Two books about getting better On my street in Yogyakarta a jamu seller passes at seven each morning, bottles in a basket on her back; there is a clinic at the corner by the traffic lights. Most families I know use both, on the same day if necessary. Here are two books that take one side each seriously. Susan-Jane Beers, Jamu: The Ancient Indonesian Art of Herbal Healing , comes from years of talking to sellers, growers and palace herbalists in Java. She explains the daily drinks — kunyit asam, turmeric and tamarind — and how recipes pass from mother to daughter without being written down. A glass from the woman on this street costs about 5,000 rupiah. It is best when it lets people talk, weakest at the question a reader will ask: does the drink work? Beers reports belief, and leaves it there. Sonia Shah's The Fever follows malaria, and the chapter that matters here is drug resistance. Malaria parasites that no longer died from chloroquine appeared first near the Thai–Cambodian border in the late 1950s; half a century later, resistance to artemisinin, the current drug, surfaced in western Cambodia — the same corner of the world twice. Her point is uncomfortable: a medicine that works today can stop working, so somebody has to keep testing it. Read together, the difference is not old against new but what each side accepts as proof: Beers records long experience, Shah records trials and numbers. And neither shelf is automatically safe — BPOM, the national drug agency, regularly pulls "traditional" powders off the market because a factory has quietly mixed painkillers in. Give the first to a visitor who wants to understand the basket, and the second to a student who wants to know why the clinic changed its malaria tablets. References Lim, S. (2018). The Herbal Healers of Nusantara: Traditional Remedies of Southeast Asia. Archipelago Press. Tan, C. (2020). Modern Medicine in the Tropics: Advances and Challenges. Tropical Health Journal, 12(3), pp. 112-125.