Locating the Medical

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.

About the Editors

Rohan Deb Roy is Lecturer in South Asian History at the University of Reading. He received his PhD from University College London, UK. He is the author of Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909 (2017).
Guy N.A. Attewell is an independent researcher, and divides his time between Tamil Nadu, India, and the UK. He was formerly a Researcher in the Department of Social Sciences at the French Institute of Pondicherry, India, and taught in University College London, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, UK.

Table of contents

Introduction: Locating the Medical 1
Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N.A. Attewell

I PRODUCTION OF THE MEDICAL
1. Sociological Description and the Forensics of Sexuality 23
Durba Mitra
2. Treacherous Minds, Submissive Bodies: Corporeal Technologies and Human Experimentation in Colonial India 47
Chandak Sengoopta
3. Confessions of the Unfriendly Spleen: Medicine, Violence, and That Mysterious Organ of Colonial India 71
Sudipta Sen

II ENACTMENTS OF THE MEDICAL
4. State Medicine or Medical State? A Prison Epidemic in Colonial Burma, 1881 103
Jonathan Saha
5. ‘Dr. Kar I Presume!’: ‘Medical’ Narratives from the Jarawa Tribal Reserve 126
Vishvajit Pandya and Madhumita Mazumdar

III RETHINKING DISCONNECTIONS AND CONTINUITIES
6. The Making of an Eclectic Archive: Epistemologies of Global Knowledge in the Papers of J.P. Walker (1823–1906) 151
Clare Anderson
7. Absence, Abundance, and Excess: Substances and Sowa Rigpa in Ladakh since the 1960s 169 Calum Blaikie
8. Colonizing Cannabis: Medication, Taxation, Intoxication, and Oblivion, c. 1839–1955 200
James H. Mills

IV CONTOURS OF THE MEDICAL
9. Re-thinking the ‘Medical’ through the Lens of the ‘Indigenous’: Narratives from Mahanubhav Healing Shrines in Maharashtra, India 219
Shubha Ranganathan
10. Vernacularizing Political Medicine: Locating the Medical betwixt the Literal and the Literary in Two Texts on the Burdwan Fever, Bengal c. 1870s 235
Projit Bihari Mukharji
11. Technology and Health in Late Colonial India 264
David Arnold
Afterword: Making ‘the Medical’ 285
Mark Harrison

Notes on Editors and Contributors 297
Index 302