Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal

Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal PDF Author: Apalak Das
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032604923
Category : Bengal (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Leprosy, widely mentioned in different religious texts and ancient scriptures, is the oldest scourge of humankind. Cases of leprosy continue to be found across the world as the most crucial health problem, especially in India and Brazil. There are a few maladies that eventually turn into social disquiets and leprosy is undoubtedly one of them. This book traces the dynamics of the interface between colonial policy on leprosy and religion, science, and society in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. It explores how the idea of 'degeneration' and the 'desolates' shaped the colonial legality of segregating 'lepers' in Indian society. The author also delves into the treatments of leprosy that were often transfigured from 'original' English texts, written by American or British medical professionals, into Bengali. Rich in archival resources, this book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Indian history, public health, social history, medical humanities, medical history, and colonial history"--

Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal

Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal PDF Author: Apalak Das
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032604923
Category : Bengal (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Leprosy, widely mentioned in different religious texts and ancient scriptures, is the oldest scourge of humankind. Cases of leprosy continue to be found across the world as the most crucial health problem, especially in India and Brazil. There are a few maladies that eventually turn into social disquiets and leprosy is undoubtedly one of them. This book traces the dynamics of the interface between colonial policy on leprosy and religion, science, and society in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. It explores how the idea of 'degeneration' and the 'desolates' shaped the colonial legality of segregating 'lepers' in Indian society. The author also delves into the treatments of leprosy that were often transfigured from 'original' English texts, written by American or British medical professionals, into Bengali. Rich in archival resources, this book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Indian history, public health, social history, medical humanities, medical history, and colonial history"--

Leprosy and Empire

Leprosy and Empire PDF Author: Rod Edmond
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 3

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Book Description
An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the believed spread of leprosy. Across the empire this involved isolating victims of the disease in 'colonies', often on offshore islands. Discussion of the segregation of lepers is then extended to analogous examples of this practice, which, it is argued, has been an essential part of the repertoire of colonialism in the modern period. The book also examines literary representations of leprosy in Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century writing, and concludes with a discussion of traveller-writers such as R. L. Stevenson and Graham Greene who described and fictionalised their experience of staying in a leper colony.

Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal

Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal PDF Author: Apalak Das
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003862241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Leprosy, widely mentioned in different religious texts and ancient scriptures, is the oldest scourge of humankind. Cases of leprosy continue to be found across the world as the most crucial health problem, especially in India and Brazil. There are a few maladies that eventually turn into social disquiets, and leprosy is undoubtedly one of them. This book traces the dynamics of the interface between colonial policy on leprosy and religion, science and society in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries. It explores how the idea of ‘degeneration’ and the ‘desolates’ shaped the colonial legality of segregating ‘lepers’ in Indian society. The author also delves into the treatments of leprosy that were often transfigured from ‘original’ English texts, written by American or British medical professionals, into Bengali. Rich in archival resources, this book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Indian history, public health, social history, medical humanities, medical history and colonial history.

Leprosy in Colonial South India

Leprosy in Colonial South India PDF Author: J. Buckingham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403932735
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Leprosy is a neglected topic in the burgeoning field of the history of medicine and the colonized body. Leprosy in Colonial South India is not only a history of an intriguing and dramatic endemic disease, it is a history of colonial power in nineteenth-century British India as seen through the lens of British medical and legal encounters with leprosy and its sufferers in south India. Leprosy in Colonial South India offers a detailed examination of the contribution of leprosy treatment and legislative measures to negotiated relationships between indigenous and British medicine and the colonial impact on indigenous class formation, while asserting the agency of the poor and vagrant leprous classes in their own history.

Health, Medicine and Empire

Health, Medicine and Empire PDF Author: Biswamoy Pati
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description


The Black Hole of Empire

The Black Hole of Empire PDF Author: Partha Chatterjee
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of "the black hole of Calcutta" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. The Black Hole of Empire follows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the "civilizing" force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India. Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal

Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal PDF Author: Arabinda Samanta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351399659
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Making epidemics in colonial Bengal as its entry point and drawing heavily on social, cultural and linguistic anthropology to understand the functions of health experiences, distribution of illness, prevention of sickness, social relations of therapeutic intervention and employment of pluralistic medical systems, the book interrogates the social construction of medical knowledge, politics of science, and the changing paradigm of relationship between health of the individual and the prerogatives of larger colonial economic formations. Smallpox, plague, cholera and malaria which visited colonial Bengal with epidemic vengeance, caught the people unaware, killed them in thousands, and changed the society and its demographic structures. The book shows how sometimes through mutual adaptation but more often by cultural contestation, people pulled on with their microbial fellow travellers, and how illness became metaphor for the social dangers of improper code of conduct, to be corrected only through personal expropriation of the sin committed, or by community worship of the deity supposedly responsible for it. As a result, Western medical science was often relegated to the background, and elaborate rites and rituals, supposedly having curative values, came to the forefront and were observed with much community fanfare. Epidemics were also interpreted as outcome of politically incorrect moves made by the ruling power. To right the wrongs, people very often resorted to social protest. The protest by the literati went sometimes muted when its members seem to be beneficiaries of the colonial government, but it turned out to be all the more violent when the people, who had no private axe to grind, took up the cudgel to fight it out.

The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India

The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India PDF Author: Biswamoy Pati
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134042604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book analyzes the diverse facets of the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. It explores a unique set of themes that capture the diversities of India, such as public health, medical institutions, mental illness and the politics and economics of colonialism. Based on inter-disciplinary research, the contributions offer valuable insight into topics that have recently received increased scholarly attention, including the use of opiates and the role of advertising in driving medical markets. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars in the field, incorporate sources ranging from palm leaf manuscripts to archival materials. This book will be of interest to scholars of history, especially the history of medicine and the history of colonialism and imperialism, sociology, social anthropology, cultural theory, and South Asian Studies, as well as to health workers and NGOs.

Public Health in British India

Public Health in British India PDF Author: Mark Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
After years of neglect the last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the medical history of India under colonial rule. This is the first major study of public health in British India. It covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes towards India and its inhabitants, and the way in which these were reflected in medical literature and medical policy; the fate of public health at local level under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book places medicine within the context of debates about the government of India, and relations between rulers and ruled. In emphasising the active role of the indigenous population, and in its range of material, it differs significantly from most other work conducted in this subject area.

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India PDF Author: Biswamoy Pati
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351262181
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.