Nationalizing the Body

by Mukharji, Projit Bihari

• ISBN13: 9781843313151
• ISBN10: 1843313154
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-01
• Publisher: Anthem Pr

Summary

This book seeks to move emphasis away from the over-riding importance given to the state in existing studies of ls"westernrs" medicine in India. Instead, it locates the Bengali doctors within their cultural, social and professional milieus. It maps how these doctors came to see themselves and their professional identity. Based on their own writings rather than the government records compiled mostly by bureaucrats, this book attempts to see how various medical problems, challenges and debates were understood and interpreted within overlapping contexts of social identities and politics on the one hand, and having to function within a largely unregulated medical market on the other. The notion of a ls"medical marketrs" has been used in the study of British and South African medical history and, with adequate qualifications and modifications, provides a powerful tool for understanding Bengali Indian medical history as well. By placing these early doctors within their social, cultural, professional and economic contexts, the book will also situate their work within a ls"mixed economy of healthrs" where they competed and engaged with contending medical ls"systemsrs" and used and appropriated newly developing institutions such as a market in medical publications and newspaper advertising. The study therefore analyzes the overall context within which ls"westernrs" medicine came to acquire a social, cultural and economic presence distinct from its affiliations with the state.

Author Biography

Projit Bihari Mukharji is a Wellcome Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and School of Oriental and African Studies, London where he was a Felix Fellow. He has taught at the universities of Southampton and Newcastle. Apart from the history of medicine he also writes on the history of British imperial popular culture.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Healers in Context: Forgotten Pioneers	p. 35
Daktari Prints: The World of Bengali Printing and the Multiple Inscriptions of Daktari Medicine	p. 75
Contagious Nationalism: Contagion and the Actualization of the Nation	p. 111
Political Plague: Diagnosing a Neo-Hindu Modernity	p. 147
Endemic Commerce: Cholera and the Medical Market	p. 179
Dhatu Dourbalya: Diagnosing the Rhizoid Pathologies of Weakness	p. 213
Conclusion	p. 249
Notes	p. 261
Bibliography	p. 311
Index	p. 337
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