At the end of the nineteenth century, the kingdom of Siam was beset by the threat of foreign imperial intervention. Unequal treaties restricted its sovereignty in matters of trade and finance and established extraterritorial legal protections for foreign residents. As the external threat of imperial incursion rose in the 1890s, the Siamese state turned inward and fixated on the specter of foreign violence against Siamese subjects. State officials invested in new forms of expertise—legal and medico-legal—in order to investigate unnatural deaths and to produce forms of forensic evidence that would meet the standards of foreign consular courts.
Against this backdrop of international intrigue, a Sino-Thai physician, Mo (Dr.) Meng Yim, entered the morgue of the Police Hospital. While laboring alongside British physicians who were appointed to give the proceedings a sense of objectivity, Meng Yim did the crucial work of not only conducting autopsies but of documenting the proceedings in ways that would be acceptable to both foreign consular courts and to this superiors in the Siamese Ministry of the Capital. This paper explores the life and especially the labors of Meng Yim as documented in the inquest files of the Ministry of the Capital, which record the multifaceted ways in which he translated, touted, and tested the authority of forensic expertise. Meng Yim’s story contains lessons about the subordinate status of indigenous scientists in the colonial world and the challenges of practicing and promoting Western medical science in an age when it was anything but definitive.
