Germanophone Physicians in the Dutch East Indies is the first comprehensive study to examine the case of physicians from the German-speaking parts of the German States and Empire, Switzerland, and Habsburg Austria employed with the Dutch East Indies’ military and civil health services from 1873 to the 1920s. By focusing on medical professionals from regions with no, late, or short-lived colonial overseas possessions of their own in ‘foreign’ imperial services, the study pursues three interrelated aims. First, this thesis is situated within a large and growing body of research that investigates the history of empire from a transimperial perspective, attempting to unite seemingly distinct national and imperial settings within ‘the same analytical field’. On the one hand, by highlighting the various contributions of Swiss and Austrian physicians to Dutch colonial medicine and revealing how medical discourse in Switzerland and the Habsburg Empire was shaped by medical professionals ‘in the colonial field’, this study further elucidates the colonial entanglements of European regions that did not possess their own ‘formal’ colonial empires. On the other hand, by tracing the trajectories of physicians from the German States and Empire in Dutch imperial services before, during, and after the establishment of the German Colonial Empire, it further expands the spatial and temporal framework of conventional Dutch and German colonial history. Second, this study contributes to a bourgeoning strand of historiography exploring the role of empire in the self-perception and -fashioning of European, middle-class men. A key objective is to shed light on the ways in which joining ‘foreign’ imperial services could serve as a valuable means for physicians striving for upward social mobility, financial security, or the embodiment of hegemonic masculinity ideals. As various examples analyzed in the framework of this study demonstrate, Germanophone physicians serving the Dutch colonial health care institutions in Southeast Asia ...