Social History Of Medicine In Colonial India

By Prof. John Bosco Lourdusamy | IIT Madras

Learners enrolled: 526 | Exam registration: 71

ABOUT THE COURSE:

This course seeks to examine the links between medicine and colonialism in the Indian context, roughly between the 18th and 20th centuries. It will focus particularly on the social and cultural dimensions of the encounter between western medicine and indigenous systems. The course will also discuss the institutionalization of public health in India and examine how the colonial encounter left lasting legacies.

This course will enable the students to understand the growth of modern medical science and practices in colonial India; the social and cultural dimensions of the colonial public health and medical policies; and the nature of the encounter between diverse medical traditions

INTENDED AUDIENCE:

1.Undergraduates and Graduates from Humanities and Social Science Departments

2.Elective for Undergraduates and Graduates from BTech courses

3.PhD students in History

Summary

Course Status :	Completed
Course Type :	Elective
Duration :	8 weeks
Category :	Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit Points :	2
Level :	Undergraduate/Postgraduate
Start Date :	21 Aug 2023
End Date :	13 Oct 2023
Enrollment Ends :	21 Aug 2023
Exam Registration Ends :	15 Sep 2023
Exam Date :	29 Oct 2023 IST

Note: This exam date is subjected to change based on seat availability. You can check final exam date on your hall ticket.

Page Visits

Course layout

Week 1: Introduction: Significance of medicine in the colonial context - Colonial understandings of Indian landscape, diseases and causations - Initial attitudes towards indigenous systems – Concerns about survival and initial medical measures

Week 2: The IMS (Indian Medical Service) - Medical Departments - Enclavism - Shifts in the discourses on race, climate and diseases - Hill stations and Sanatoria - Medical Education

Week 3: From White personnel’s health to ‘Native’ and Public Health - Challenge of Epidemics (Smallpox, Malaria, Cholera, Plague), Sanitary Measures, Challenges of International Trade and Politics

Week 4: Local Response - Compliances and Resistances - Cultural challenges - Volunteer Associations – Role of media and local intelligentsia

Week 5: Tropical Paradigm - Tropical Diseases and Tropical Medicine; Medical Research – Emergence of Bacteriological and other Research Institutions – Malarial and other field surveys/researches - Vaccine Research and Production

Week 6: Colonial Medicine and Women – Zenana Missions, Lock Hospitals, Scientific Midwifery, Nursing, Women’s Medical Institutions, Women’s Medical Service (WMS).

Week 7: Non-State initiatives – Setting up of funds, dispensaries, hospitals and colleges through private philanthropy – Role of Missionaries

Week 8: Western versus Indigenous Systems – Revivalist movements - Professionalization of indigenous systems - Standardization of texts and drugs - Commercialization

Books and references

1.Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2.Bala, Poonam, ed. 2012. Contesting Colonial Authority: Medicine and Indigenous Responses in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century India. Lanham: Lexington Books.
3.Chakrabarti, Pratik. 2014. Medicine and Empire: 1600 - 1960. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
4.Harrison, Mark. 1994. Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859 - 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5.Kumar, Anil. 1998. Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.
6.Kumar, Deepak, and Raj Sekhar Basu, eds. 2013. Medical Encounters in British India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
7.Mukherjee, Sujata. 2017. Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India: Women’s Health Care in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
8.Pati, Biswamoy, and Mark Harrison, eds. 2009. The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India. New York: Routledge.

Additional Reference Books and Articles:

1.Amrith, Sunil. 2006. Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
2.Arnold, David. 1991. “The Indian Ocean as a Disease Zone, 1500–1950.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14 (2): 1–21.
3.Arnold, David. 1996. Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.
4.Arnold, David. 2000. Science, Medicine and Technology in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5.Alavi, Seema. 2008. Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Tradition 1600-1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
6.Attewell, Guy. 2007. Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
7.Berger, Rachel. 2013. Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India 1900-1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
8.Bewell, Alan. 1999. “Cholera, Sanitation and Colonial Representations of India”. In Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 242-276. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
9.Bhattacharya, Sanjoy and Niels Brimnes. 2009. “Introduction: Simultaneously Global and Local: Reassessing Smallpox Vaccination and Its Spread, 1789–1900.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83 (1): 1–16.
10.Brimnes, Niels. 2004. “Variolation, Vaccination and Popular Resistance in Early Colonial South India.” Medical History 48 (2): 199–228.
11.Chakrabarti, Pratik. 2009. “Signs of the Times: Medicine and Nationhood in British India.” Osiris, 24: 188-211.
12.Chakrabarti, Pratik. 2012. Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics. Rochester Studies in Medical History: 22. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
13.Das, Shinjini. 2019. Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, Market and Homoeopathy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
14.DV. Kanagarathinam. 2018. “Indigenous and Western Medicines in Colonial South India: Nature of Discourses and Impact.” Indian Journal of History of Science 53 (2): 182 – 204.
15.Ganesan, Uma. 2010. “Medicine and Modernity: The Ayurvedic Revival Movement in India.” Studies on Asia Series 4 (1): 108-31.
16.Gupta, Brahmananda. 1976. “Indigenous Medicine in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Bengal.” In Asian Medical Systems, 368-378. Edited by Charles Leslie. Berkeley: University of California Press.
17.Hardiman, David, and Projit Bihari Mukherjee. 2015. Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics. Routledge.
18.Harrison, Mark. 2002. Climates & Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850. Oxford India Paperbacks. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
19.Harrison, Mark. 2011. “Medicine and Colonialism in South Asia since 1500.” In Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, 285–301. Edited by Mark Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
20.Harrison, Mark. 2015. “A Global Perspective: Reframing the History of Health, Medicine and Disease.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89 (4): 639-88.
21.Hodges, Sarah. 2016. Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920-1940. New York: Taylor & Francis.
22.Hume, John Chandler. 1986. “Colonialism and Sanitary Medicine: The Development of Preventive Health Policy in the Punjab, 1860 to 1900.” Modern Asian Studies 20 (4): 703–24.
23.Klein, Ira. 1988. “Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India.” Modern Asian Studies 22 (4): 723-755.
24.Kumar, Deepak, ed. 2012. Disease and Medicine in India: A Historical Overview. New Delhi: Tulika.
25.Lal, Maneesha. 1994. “The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, 1885-1888.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68 (1): 29–66.
26.Lang, Sean. 2005. “Drop the demon dai: maternal mortality and the state in colonial Madras, 1840–1875.” Social History of Medicine 18 (3): 357-378.
27.Mukharji, Projit Bihari. 2016. Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences. The University of Chicago Press.
28.Mukharji, Projit Bihari. 2019. “Akarnan: The Stethoscope and Making of Modern Ayurveda, Bengal, c. 1894–1952.” Technology and Culture 60 (4): 953–78.
29.Nair, Aparna. 2019. “Vaccinating against Vasoori: Eradicating smallpox in the ‘model’ princely state of Travancore, 1804–1946.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review: 1-26.
30.Pati, Biswamoy, and Mark Harrison, eds. 2018. Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India. New York and London: Routledge.
31.Polu, Sandhya L. 2012. Infectious Disease in India, 1892-1940: Policy-Making and the Perception of Risk. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan.
32.Ramanna, Mridula. 2008. “Women Physicians as Vital Intermediaries in Colonial Bombay.” Economic and Political Weekly 43 (12): 71-78.
33.Ramanna, Mridula. 2012. Health Care in Bombay Presidency, 1896-1930. Delhi: Primus Books.
34.Ramanna, Mridula. 2020. Facets of Public Health in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay. Delhi: Primus Books.
35.Ramasubban, Radhika. 1988. “Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900.” In Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western India and the Experience of European Expansion, 38–60. Edited by R. MacLeod and M. Lewis. London: Routledge.
36.Rao, B. Eswara. 2006. “From Rajayak s(h)ma (‘Disease of kings’) to ‘Blackman’s Plague’: Perceptions on prevalence and aetiology of tuberculosis in the Madras Presidency, 1882–1947.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 43(4): 457-485.
37.Robertson, Jo. 2009. “The Leprosy Asylum in India.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 4: 474-517.
38.Sehrawat, Samiksha. 2013. Colonial Medical Care in North India: Gender, State, and Society, c. 1840-1920. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
39.Sivaramakrishnan, Kavita. 2006. Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab 1850-1945. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
40.Sujatha, V. 2009. “The Patient as Knower: Principle and Practice in Siddha Medicine.” Economic and Political Weekly 44 (16): 76-83.
41.Watts, Sheldon. 2001. “From Rapid Change to Stasis: Official Responses to Cholera in British-Ruled India and Egypt: 1860 to c. 1921.” Journal of World History 12 (2): 321–74.
42.Weiss, Richard S. 2009. Recipes for Immortality: Medicine, Religion, and Community in South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
43.Worboys, Michael. 2000. “The Colonial World as Mission and Mandate, Leprosy and Empire: 1900-1940.” Osiris 15: 207-18.

Instructor bio

Prof. John Bosco Lourdusamy

IIT Madras

Prof.John Bosco Lourdusamy is with the Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He works in the domains of plantations, global movement of crops, and the history of science, technology and medicine in colonial India.He had studied B.A in History in Loyola College, Chennai and M.A and M.Phil., in Pondicherry University. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford for his thesis on “Science and National Consciousness: A Study of the Response to Modern Science in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1930”. While at Oxford, he had also been a Queen Elizabeth Visiting Scholar to the Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.Prof.Lourdusamy has authored the books: Science and National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870-1930, (2004); Religion and Modern Science in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1940, (2007). He was an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology (2013-15) and a member of the Research Council, Indian National Commission for the History of Science - an organ of the Indian National Science Academy (2014-16). He was part of a multi-author book writing project on "Moving Crops" under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin.He is also a member of the Editorial Board of Technology and Culture - the leading international Journal in the area of History and Social Studies of Technology.

Course certificate

The course is free to enroll and learn from. But if you want a certificate, you have to register and write the proctored exam conducted by us in person at any of the designated exam centres.

The exam is optional for a fee of Rs 1000/- (Rupees one thousand only).

Date and Time of Exams: 29 October 2023 Morning session 9am to 12 noon; Afternoon Session 2pm to 5pm.

Registration url: Announcements will be made when the registration form is open for registrations.

The online registration form has to be filled and the certification exam fee needs to be paid. More details will be made available when the exam registration form is published. If there are any changes, it will be mentioned then.

Please check the form for more details on the cities where the exams will be held, the conditions you agree to when you fill the form etc.

CRITERIA TO GET A CERTIFICATE

Average assignment score = 25% of average of best 6 assignments out of the total 8 assignments given in the course.
Exam score = 75% of the proctored certification exam score out of 100

Final score = Average assignment score + Exam score

YOU WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR A CERTIFICATE ONLY IF AVERAGE ASSIGNMENT SCORE >=10/25 AND EXAM SCORE >= 30/75. If one of the 2 criteria is not met, you will not get the certificate even if the Final score >= 40/100.

Certificate will have your name, photograph and the score in the final exam with the breakup.It will have the logos of NPTEL and IIT Madras .It will be e-verifiable at nptel.ac.in/noc.

Only the e-certificate will be made available. Hard copies will not be dispatched.

Once again, thanks for your interest in our online courses and certification. Happy learning.

- NPTEL team