Cumin, Capsules, and Colonialism

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 170-197
Author(s):  
Shobna Nijhawan
Keyword(s):  
Folk Medicine ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Allopathic Medicine ◽  
Obstetrics And Gynecology ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Medical Traditions ◽  
Medical Disciplines ◽  
Healthy Body

AbstractThe institutionalization of Western allopathic medicine in colonial India had significant implications for the cultural politics of the early twentieth century. The introduction of vaccinations, the establishment of hospitals and dispensaries, scientific discourses on hygiene, bacteriology, and nutrition, the emergence of obstetrics and gynecology as medical disciplines, and the commercialization of medicine—to name but a few aspects of the institutionalization or elements leading thereto—were all topics that also concerned the Hindi literary sphere. This essay investigates how the Hindi literary public tackled the colonial state’s promotion of allopathy and modern sciences while, within the same discourse, it (re)discovered, systemized, and modernized indigenous medical knowledge traditions—most notably Ayurveda but also homespun remedies and folk medicine—for the prevention, treatment, and cure of disease. Prose fiction and prose essays, alongside advertisements in Hindi periodicals, testify to a range of opinions on what constituted a “healthy” blend of diverse “Eastern” and diverse “Western” medical traditions. This essay argues that the Hindi discourse on medicine and colonial modernity was steered by gendered nationalist politics, modern Western sciences, and commercial interests in maintaining a healthy body and working toward a healthy nation.

Pre-Hispanic Ophthalmology

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-56
Author(s):  
José Dalma-Weiszhausz
Keyword(s):  
Folk Medicine ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Universe

The pre-Hispanic cultures of Mesoamerica had a complex set of beliefs, philosophy and comprehensive medical knowledge. Their concept of the nature of disease included their place in nature, the universe, and their relationship with their gods and astrology. Unfortunately, most of that information was lost but what remains highlights a native herbal pharmacopeia and surgical abilities on par with their European counterparts from that time. Some of these remedies are still widely used as folk medicine in the region. prehispánico, precolombino, Mesoamérica, oftalmología, historia, remedios herbolarios, cirugía, códice, de la Cruz-Badiano; Florentino; de Sahagún Bernardino.

scholarly journals Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
SANGHAMITRA MISRA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Northeastern India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

Surviving Desire: Reading Ḥāfiz̤ in Colonial India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Ali Altaf Mian
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
The World ◽  
Mystical Theology

Abstract This article contributes to scholarship on Muslim humanities, Islam in modern South Asia, and the Urdu literary tradition in colonial India. It does so by contextualizing and closely reading Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī’s (1863–1943) commentary on the Dīvān of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Ḥāfiz̤. Unlike his modernist contemporaries, Ashraf ʿAlī does not read Ḥāfiz̤ through the prisms of social reform or anti-colonial nationalist struggle. Rather, in his capacity as a Sufi master, he approaches Ḥāfiz̤’s Dīvān as a mystical text in order to generate insights through which he counsels his disciples. He uses the commentary genre to explore Sufi themes such as consolation, contraction, annihilation, subsistence, and the master-disciple relational dynamic. His engagement with Ḥāfiz̤’s ġhazals enables him to elaborate a practical mystical theology and to eroticize normative devotional rituals. Yet the affirmation of an analogical correspondence between sensual and divine love on the part of Ashraf ʿAlī also implies the survival of Ḥāfiz̤’s emphases on the disposability of the world and intoxicated longing for the beloved despite the demands of colonial modernity.

scholarly journals ЛОГІКА МІЖДИСЦИПЛІНАРНОГО ПІДХОДУ ДО СВОЄЧАСНОЇ ДІАГНОСТИКИ ТА ЛІКУВАННЯ КРОВОТЕЧ В АКУШЕРСТВІ ТА ГІНЕКОЛОГІЇ : ПОБУДОВА ЗАДАЧНОЇ ОНТОЛОГІЇ

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. V. Golyanovskyy ◽  
N. A. Sіnіenko ◽  
O. M. Verner
Keyword(s):  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Obstetrics And Gynecology ◽  
Treat Ment ◽  
Telemedicine Consultation ◽  
Ontological Model

Resume. The questions of the ordering of knowledge in solving problems of diagnosis and treat ment of bleeding in obstetrics and gynecology, the problem of constructing ontological models of medical knowledge for bleeding. There is justified the transformation of modern ideas in the ontological model direction. Through the use of standar di zed rules and corresponding models proposed unified platfor m telemedicine consultation feedback.

Von „Chrut und Uchrut“ zu „Darm mit Charme“. Populäre medizinische Ratgeber zwischen Vermittlung, Unterhaltung und Erzählung

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Malte Völk
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Transfer ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Folk Medicine ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Narrative Art ◽  
Story Collection ◽  
Definition Of

The article follows the intertwining of Walter Benjamin’s narrative theory with a Swiss herbal book from 1911 (Johann Künzle: “Chrut und Uchrut”). The resulting findings on the connection between ancient “folk medicine” and narrative art are associated with the enormous popularity of this book, which continues to this day. Benjamin’s definition of a storyteller who takes what he tells from experience is used as a heuristic category to comparatively examine the contemporary book from Giulia Enders: “Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ” (German 2014, English 2016). What both books have in common, apart from their extraordinary popularity, is that they elude clear genre definitions. They are both hybrids of medical guide, nutritional guide and entertaining story collection. To answer the question of how medical knowledge is conveyed, the narrative characteristics of the books are analysed and compared. A persistence of patterns of knowledge transfer in connection with the topos of activating the readers’ own experiences is revealed.

Theoretical Medicine vs. Practical Medicine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa A. Vaughan
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Medicine ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Folk Medicine ◽  
Traditional Healers ◽  
Traditional Healing ◽  
Practical Medicine ◽  
Theoretical Medicine ◽  
Mainstream Medicine ◽  
Medical Traditions ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter examines the differences between theoretical medicine, empirical medicine (or medicine as practiced), and folk medicine. A particular focus on midwives and traditional healers will be enhanced by examining folklore, herbals, and other diverse examples where we can find evidence of traditional medicine. Examples of contemporary debates between traditional healing and mainstream medicine may help us sort out the different medical traditions of the Middle Ages.

Decolonizing Medicine

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Alex Broadbent
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Medicine ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Mainstream Medicine ◽  
Medical Traditions

The phrase “traditional medicine” is commonly used to refer to medical traditions originating outside the West, and still practiced either as alternatives to or alongside Mainstream Medicine. Hard and dismissive attitudes to traditions with non-Western origins are obviously insensitive. It is clear that power and knowledge are intertwined. What counts as knowledge is partly determined by who has power. Moreover, medicine is clearly imbued with cultural influence. Yet if we reject medical relativism, we cannot accept that medicine is simply a cultural expression. We must consider which of two conflicting traditions, or two incompatible prescriptions, is correct (if either is). Medical Cosmopolitanism is a tool for negotiating the opposing temptations of excessive tolerance and dogmatism, and for understanding how one might “decolonize” medical knowledge. The chapter suggests that developments of the notion of decolonization can prevent a collapse into medical relativism, espousing “critical decolonization.”

Irreverent Reading: Humor, Erudition and Subalternity in the fiction of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Fakir Mohan Senapati

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-198
Author(s):  
Aruni Mahapatra
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Gayatri Spivak

This essay examines scenes from prose fiction in which two Indian novelists (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Fakir Mohan Senapati) interrogated subalternity in colonial India by talking about books. It first examines narrators’ frustration with books as acts of “irreverent reading” in colonial India, where the presence and scarcity of readable print produced anxieties about language and community. It then examines “reading” in the novels and compares how different kinds of irreverence allows narrators to introduce women characters as agents of very different kinds of violence in colonial India. Following insights of Gayatri Spivak, Elleke Boehmer, and Leah Price, and others, this article argues that Fakir Mohan Senapati’s sensitivity to his readers’ inability to access books enabled his novel to empower readers without books and emphasize how community in colonial India was constituted by the collective forgetting of women.

The Role of Crowdsourcing in the Healthcare Industry

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-201
Author(s):  
Kabir C. Sen
Keyword(s):  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Positive Change ◽  
Healthcare Industry ◽  
Medical Problems ◽  
Population Groups ◽  
Social Quality ◽  
The Social ◽  
Medical Traditions ◽  
The Ideal

Crowdsourcing has a role to play in solving healthcare-based problems as it can tap into a vast pool of global medical knowledge. This chapter first categorizes the various problems in the healthcare industry. It then describes the differences in various medical traditions in solving medical problems. The chapter also discusses the challenges in identifying the ideal medical solution. It notes the various types of obstacles to adopting effective healthcare solutions and suggests crowdsourcing solutions that could build up an impetus for bringing about positive change. Finally, the chapter emphasizes the potential of crowdsourcing to disrupt old ideas and introduce new ones as well as make a significant improvement in the social quality for different population groups.

scholarly journals Akbar or Aurangzeb? Ethics, Empire, and Print Publics in Colonial India

Itinerario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-286
Author(s):  
Leigh Denault
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Press ◽  
Civic Institutions ◽  
Healthy Body

AbstractIn the 1870s, Indian news editors warned their readers of a series of crises threatening India. They saw the famines, wars, and poverty that they were describing as symptoms of the same illness: Colonial governors had failed to implement an ethical system of governance, and had therefore failed to create a healthy body politic, choosing to expend energy in punishing or censoring dissent when they should have been constructing more durable civic institutions. In North India, earlier Mughal traditions of political philosophy and governance offered a template to critique the current state. In drawing on these traditions, editors linked multiple registers of dissent, from simple ‘fables’ about emperors to more sophisticated arguments drawn from newly reinterpreted akhlaq texts, creating a print record of the multilingual, multivalent literary and oral worlds of Indian political thought. The figures of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb, representing the zenith and nadir of Mughal sovereignty, in turn linked popular and learned discussions on statecraft, good governance, and personal responsibility in an age of crisis. The press itself became a meeting point for multivalent discourses connecting South Asian publics, oral and literate, in their exploration of the nature of just rule in the context of empire, calling, in the process, new ‘publics’ into being.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document