Health, Medicine and Empire

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.

Biswamoy pati, is Reader at the Department of History, Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University. He is the author of Situating Social History: Orissa, 1800-1997 (2001); and resisting Domination: Peasants, Tribals and the National Movement in Orissa, 1920-50 (1993). He has edited Turbulent Times: India, 1940-1944 (1998); and Issues in Modern India History: for Sumit Sarkar (2000).

Mark Harrison, is Senior Research fellow and Assistant Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. He was formerly senior Lecturer in History at the Sheffield Hallam University. His publications include public Health in British India: anglo-India preventive Medicine, 1859-1914 (1994) and Climates and Constitutions: Health, race, environment and British Imperialism in South Asia, 1600-1850 (1999).