This volume explores the nature of interactions between the East and the West in the field of medicine.It focuses on examples from India's medical tradition and the challenges it faced when modern medical system entered the country as part of the British colonial rule.

Interrelated histories of colonial medicine, market and family reveal how Western homeopathy was translated and made vernacular in colonial India.

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.

In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers. Focusing on three major epidemic diseases—smallpox, cholera, and plague—Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions. By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.

An examination of medicine's role in the consolidation of colonial rule in the Indian Raj.

This book analyses the interface between medicine and colonial society through the lens of gender. The work traces the growth of hospital medicine in nineteenth century Bengal and shows how it created a space-albeit small-for providing western health care to female patients. It observes that, unlike in the colonial setup, before the advent of hospital medicine women were treated mostly by female practitioners of indigenous therapies who had commendable skill as practitioners. The book also explores the linkages of growth of medical education for women and the role of the Brahmo Samaj in this process. The manuscript tackles several crucial questions including those of racial discrimination, reproductive health practices, sexual health, famines and mortality, and the role of women's agencies and other organizations in popularizing western medicine and healthcare.