‘Dr. Kar I Presume!’

This chapter draws attention to the complex trajectories of the history of biomedicine among the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups of the Andaman Islands. It argues that the scattered traces one follows to address historical or anthropological research in the tribal reserves of the Andaman Islands have led to questions that have often muddled assumptions about the category of the ‘medical.’ The chapter does a close reading of state medical discourse as it takes shape in the memoirs of a government physician in the Jarawa Tribal Reserve. It argues that Dr Kar’s memoir cum ethnography offers important insights into the contingent formations of the ‘medical’ in the interstices of tribal welfare practice in the Andaman Islands.

Absence, Abundance, and Excess

This chapter examines the ways in which changing patterns of materia medica circulation have shaped Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine) pharmacy, practice and social organization in Ladakh since the 1960s. It argues that rapid growth in the availability of formerly limited raw materials was key to the emergence of larger scales of drug production and to the proliferation, complexification and commodification of medicines. These phenomena, in turn, allowed for the emergence of professionalized forms of medical practice, the enfranchisement of certain groups, ideas and practices, and the marginalisation of others. By charting the shifting material, social, economic and pharmaceutical dimensions of Ladakhi Sowa Rigpa in relation to one another, the chapter questions the constitution and boundaries of ‘the medical realm’.

The Making of an Eclectic Archive

This chapter takes a transnational and connected history approach to the papers of Surgeon-General J.P. Walker, who was employed in the Indian Medical Service in the nineteenth century. Upon his retirement he began the process of compiling a great dictionary that reflected his medical interest in eclectic and specific medicine. Despite the surprising elision of ‘India’ from the draft of his great medical dictionary, its incorporation of the medical knowledge of Africans and Indigenous Americans reveals the globality that underpinned his medical knowledge and practice. In this respect, a critical reading of the epistemology of Walker's archive enables a new understanding of the relationship between medicine in and of Britain, South Asia and North America during the nineteenth century.

Re-Thinking the ‘Medical’ through the Lens of the ‘Indigenous’

This chapter analyses material from a contemporary anthropological study of women seeking healing in Mahanubhav temples in Maharashtra to explore how the ‘medical’ is invoked in narratives of indigenous healing. I argue that the conceptual differentiation between ‘biomedical’ and ‘indigenous’ healing systems, often referred to in the literature on medical pluralism, is in fact at odds with people’s everyday lived experiences of healing. Women’s complicated ‘healing pathways’ reflected alternation between biomedical and indigenous healing, determined by various circumstances and factors. Such fluidity was also permitted by the temple discourses of healing, which described Mahanubhav temples as ‘hospitals’, thereby proving the ‘modern’ and ‘rationalist’ temper of the shrines, even while maintaining the greater efficacy of these temples vis-à-vis biomedical treatment for healing spirit afflictions.

Afterword

This Afterword reflects on the creation of the category of ‘the medical’ and how it came to be inscribed in India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the main factors involved in this process were the needs of the state, the professionalization of medicine and the emergence of a commodity culture which encouraged people to think about their health and lifestyles in medical terms.

Technology and Health in Late Colonial India

In order to move beyond the familiar ‘epidemic–institutional nexus’ in studies of disease and medicine in modern India, this chapter argues for the importance of examining the health of the subaltern classes through three largely social and spatial arenas—the street, the factory, and the home. While these locations offered some health benefits and facilities, they also presented substantial threats to health – through the creation of novel disease environments, through accidents and pollution in the home, the workplace and on the street, and through deficient diets and new food-processing techniques. Indians faced further danger from modern machines and novel forms of technology. Taken together, these locations require a fresh understanding of what constituted health in modern Indian society.

Introduction

This introductory chapter defines the intellectual agenda of locating the medical, and explains its significance. It situates the volume as a platform for the traffic of ideas and approaches between the history of medicine as a sub-discipline and South Asian history, more generally. It sets out recent historiographical trajectories, examines the theoretical purchase of historical ontologies (as the methodological inspiration) for this project, and provides a brief outline of chapters in this collection.

Colonizing Cannabis

This chapter looks at cannabis products and their history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In part this story is about the entry of preparations of the plant into Western medical knowledge and practice. However, the chapter also demonstrates that cannabis was not simply constructed as a medicine in Western circles in this period. The ways in which competing understandings emerged of the plant and the substances that could be manufactured from it is also explored. The purpose of doing this is twofold. In the first instance the chapter begins to provide some answers to the question of ‘what is medical about colonial medicine’. In addressing this question the chapter also addresses a second concern, which is to put plants back into the picture of the history of medicine in the colonial period.

Vernacularizing Political Medicine

Christopher Hamlin describes a strand of medical thinking in nineteenth-century Britain that resisted narrow notions of disease specificity in the name of a broader, socio-economically grounded notion of ‘political medicine’. This chapter explores the vernacularization of this political medicine in Bengal in the 1870s. It focuses on the work of two specific Bengali intellectuals, viz. Dr Gopaul Chunder Roy and the Rev. Lal Behari Day. Since the former was a Glasgow-trained physician and the latter a missionary, ethnographer and novelist, the chapter also explores the differences between the literal and the literary vernacularizations of political medicine.

State Medicine or Medical State?

A devastating prison epidemic broke out in Thayetmyo jail in Lower Burma in the summer of 1881, resulting in the deaths of over one-hundred inmates. The event could be justifiably described as a failure of colonial bio-politics and the state’s use of Western medicine to preserve the lives of those under its care. Certainly all the medical interventions made to arrest the spread of the deadly disease were ineffective. Even diagnosis remained disputed. However, this episode also reveals the centrality of medical knowledge and practice to how colonial officials performed and enacted the state. The official inquiry into the epidemic demonstrates that Western medicine informed the disciplining of state practices. Rather than illustrating how medicine was deployed by the colonial state, the epidemic provides us with a window onto how the colonial state was shaped by medicine.