Colonial Medical Care in North India


Book Description

This book shows how medical care was introduced, expanded, and funded by the colonial state. Intent on limiting medical expenditure, the colonial state created a medical infrastructure with regional and rural-urban disparities in access to medical care, with an over-reliance on the private and voluntary sectors. For the first time, this book analyses medical care for both male and female patients, examining Dufferin Fund hospitals and hospitals for Indian soldiers.




Contagion and Enclaves


Book Description

Contagion and Enclaves examines the social history of medicine across two intersecting British enclaves in the major tea-producing region of colonial India: the hill station of Darjeeling and the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal. Focusing on the establishment of hill sanatoria and other health care facilities and practices against the backdrop of the expansion of tea cultivation and labor migration, it tracks the demographic and environmental transformation of the region and the critical role race and medicine played in it, showing that the British enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy.




Public Health in British India


Book Description

After years of neglect the last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the medical history of India under colonial rule. This is the first major study of public health in British India. It covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes towards India and its inhabitants, and the way in which these were reflected in medical literature and medical policy; the fate of public health at local level under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book places medicine within the context of debates about the government of India, and relations between rulers and ruled. In emphasising the active role of the indigenous population, and in its range of material, it differs significantly from most other work conducted in this subject area.




Health, Medicine and Empire


Book Description

This collection of essays weaves together several themes related to the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. Its focus ranges from analysing Europe's relationship with India's indigenous medical systems, to case studies of two mental asylums(in Madras and Lucknow), the location of the leprosy asylum, the technological aspects and social implications of the colonial vaccination policy, and to colonial interventions related specifically to cholera and plague in the pilgrimage centres of puri and pandharpur. It also examine indigenous initiatives associated with the Indian drug industry and the Unani medical system and their interactions with the colonial health establishment and modern medicine. Besides charting out hiterto unexplored areas in the history and historiography of colonial medicine and its articulation with indigenous systems, this book demonstrates the rich possibilities of inter-disciplinary research. Of particular interest to the specialist reader, it is also useful to those working on modern India history, cultural studies and sociology.




Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India


Book Description

Interrelated histories of colonial medicine, market and family reveal how Western homeopathy was translated and made vernacular in colonial India.




Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India


Book Description

The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.




Locating the Medical


Book Description

This volume interrogates the foundational categories that have come to define medical science in modern South Asia. It seeks to probe issues such as what constitutes the ‘medical’, in which context, and who defines it. This is achieved through case studies that range from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, from colonial Bengal and British Burma to present-day Andaman Islands and Ladakh. By examining the close interactions between political authorities, corporeal knowledge, and objects of governance in a sustained manner, the domains of the medical and the non-medical are revealed to be more blurred and porous than apparent. This provides us with new perspectives on the co-production of medicine and social worlds by actors and agencies in specific times and places.




Medical Encounters in British India


Book Description

This volume explores the nature of interactions between the East and the West in the field of medicine.It focuses on examples from India's medical tradition and the challenges it faced when modern medical system entered the country as part of the British colonial rule.




Modern Maternities


Book Description

1) This is one of the first systematic historical account of Medical Advice about Breastfeeding in Colonial Calcutta. 2) It has rich archival sources like rare medical handbooks and periodicals, governmental proceedings, child welfare exhibition and conference reports, personal papers, memoirs, illustrations and advertisements. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of social history and colonial history across UK.