Description
Book SynopsisThis book seeks to move emphasis away from the over-riding importance given to the state in existing studies of ‘western’ medicine in India, and locates medical practice within its cultural, social and professional milieus. Based on Bengali doctors writings this book examines how various medical problems, challenges and debates were understood and interpreted within overlapping contexts of social identities and politics on the one hand, and their function within a largely unregulated medical market on the other.
Trade Review‘Projit Mukharji presents a meticulously researched construction of the identity of “Daktari” physicians, or Indian practitioners of Western medicine, through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in British Colonial Bengal. […] A significant and definitive contribution to this field.' —Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Harvard University, in ‘Social History of Medicine’
‘This book performs the ambitious and much required task of tracing the distinct vernacular career of imperial medicine in Bengal. […] Mukharji delves into an enviably exhaustive range of sources. The deeply layered Bengali medical archive has been explored here in unprecedented detail. […] One can be certain that “Nationalizing the Body” will remain a crucial reference point not just for the histories of medicine in South Asia but colonial medicine more generally.’ —Rohan Deb Roy University of Cambridge, ‘Canadian Bulletin of Medical History’
Table of Contents1. Introduction: A Vernacular Modernity; 2. Healers in Context: Forgotten Pioneers; 3. Healing Print: Medicine and the World of Print; 4. Contagious Modernity: Domesticating an Idea; 5. The Plague in the Vernacular: A Hindu Nationalist Diagnosis; 6. Marketing Cholera: The Texts and Contexts of Bengali Responses to Cholera; 7. Dhatu Dourbolyo: Diagnosing the Rhizoid Pathologies of Racial Weakness; 8. Conclusion
