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In this volume, Bala examines medical education and medical policies in British Bengal over the period 1800 to 1947. This period saw Western medicine changing and becoming more professional in nature. However, the attempt to impose a similar pattern on the Indian systems of medicine led eventually to a conflict of interest between the two, instead of the peaceful coexistence which had prevailed at first. Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal comprises two parts -- the first, outlines the systems of indigenous medicine in ancient and medieval India and also examines the impact of the ruling authorities on the growth of the Ayurvedic and Unani systems of medicine. The second assesses the impact o...
Music, Health and the Body: Cross-Cultural Perspectives focuses on the role of music in understanding new dimensions of health and healing through a unique relationship between identity, social interactions and the human body under the overarching paradigm of culture. The recent Covid-19 pandemic also has highlighted the significance of social and individual factors in people’s perception of and their ability to cope with the pandemic situation globally through music. Based on inter-disciplinary themes, and contributions from highly qualified international cohort of scholars, the volume will command attention amongst historians, ethnologists, musicologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychotherapists and other scholars in arts and humanities.
Focusing on India and South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the essays in this collection address power and enforced modernity as applied to medicine. Clashes between traditional methods of healing and the practices brought in by colonizers are explored across both territories.
This volume presents biomedicine as a site of contestation and conflicts, of processes of adaptation, accommodation, and of resistance, in a unique relationship with colonization and social control in a medical encounter that signaled the limits of State control of indigenous populations.
This book assesses the impact of imperial policies on the medical profession in Bengal during colonial rule and covers the period 1800-1947. Dr. Poonam Bala first discusses the Indigenous medical systems which prevailed in ancient and medieval India. She examines the relationship between the ruling powers and the practitioners of the Ayurveda and Unani systems which were, on the whole, positive and led to the growth of both these medical systems under royal patronage. With the advent of British rule in Bengal this relationship began to change. The major part of the author's analysis is concerned with the Bengali experience of colonial administration and Western medicine as the last major cha...
Poonam Bala's Contesting Colonial Authority explores the interplay of conformity and defiance amongst the plural medical tradition in colonial India. The contributors reveal how Indian elites, nationalists, and the rest of the Indian population participated in the move to revisit and frame a new social character of Indian Medicine. Viewed in the light of the cultural, nationalistic, social, literary and scientific essentials, Contesting Colonial Authority highlights various indigenous interpretations and mechanisms through which Indian sciences and medicine were projected against the cultural background of a rich medical tradition.
Poonam Bala tenaciously follows the developmental trajectory of medical pluralism in India with a keen eye to the dynamic social production of health and healing systems as social systems, practices, and technologies of power.
The book premises that despite the long history of violence and discrimination against Dalits, their lives have transformed with the political and economic shifts in the country over the last three decades. It addresses these changes and interrogates the major aspects of Dalit experience associated with them.
Through an examination of the life and remarkable achievements of Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, this book reveals a great deal about both medical and scientific innovation in the nineteenth century and the circumstances in which innovation came about. It traces O'Shaughnessy's career. At the age of twenty-three in 1831 he identified the physiological cause of death from cholera and recommended intravenous saline as the cure in the face of the contemporary medical belief in bloodletting. In 1833 as an Assistant Surgeon of the East India Company, and later as Professor of Chemistry in the new Calcutta Medical School, he saw the possibilities of native plants and studied several. These incl...
Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt investigates the use of medicine as a 'tool of empire' to serve the state building process in Egypt by the British colonial administration. It argues that the colonial state effectively transformed Egyptian medical practice and medical knowledge in ways that were decidedly gendered. On the one hand, women medical professionals who had once trained as 'doctresses' (hakimas) were now restricted in their medical training and therefore saw their social status decline despite colonial modernity's promise of progress. On the other hand, the introduction of colonial medicine gendered Egyptian medicine in ways that privileged men and masculi...