Medical Encounters in British India

Description

Health, medicine, and disease were integral to the colonial discourse in British India. It was a cauldron of several medical systems interacting with and infl uencing each other. Eschewing defi nite East–West binaries,this book highlights the intermingling of medical traditions in colonial India. Interrogating received ideas on medicine in colonial India, the book claims that this confl uence of medical systems and traditions was neither uniform nor unidimensional. Though ridden with languages of dominance and hegemony, the exchange shaped and transformed both indigenous and Western medical systems. From public health policy to management of epidemics, from allopathy to humoral balance and the rise of homoeopathy, from indigenous medicines and the nationalist movement to non-governmental agencies and infanticide in British India, this book brings together different discourses on health that are central to the understanding of ‘disease’ in colonial India.