The study examines the twin issues of Western medicine and public health in Bombay during the years 1845 1895. The work is the first to explore in detail the complex interrelationship between government, municipality and individual philanthropists over the issues of Western medicine and public health measures.

This book is a study of aspects of public health in Bombay Presidency from 1896 to 1930, and is asked upon extensive primary data. It charts both the changes in the colonial plague policy, from the deadly epidemic of 1896 to the frequent epidemics that appeared in the 1900s, as well as the changes in Indian responses to that policy in different regions of the Presidency. Through a survey of unique local initiatives by activist health officials, civic leaders, and Indian doctors, efforts to bring sanitary consciousness into the public sphere, to promote preventive measures, and to tackle public health challenges like tuberculosis become apparent. The twentieth century witnessed an increasing acceptance of the idea of hospitalization and thus gave rise to the expansion of hospital facilities. This work therefore elucidates these developments through an analysis of both the funding of these expanding institutions and the classification system of admissions, as well as by providing a detailed review of maternity and mission hospitals. With these issues in mind, this work examines a range of perceptions including those of British and Indian physicians regarding the causes of high maternal and infant mortality and their suggestions to tackle it, as well as semi-official and non-official efforts to promote maternal and infant welfare. Specifically, issues such as the health of female mill workers, and the training of nurses, dais, and midwives is addressed. There was a close link between the attempts to improve the health of women and the growing number of female Indian doctors. Some of the career paths of these doctors, including their activities in the All India Women's Conference, the Association of Medical Women in India, and the National Planning Committee, are traced in this work. Through such analyses, the relative place of Western and Indian medicine in the Presidency can also be explored to reveal the manifold and complex dimensions of this encounter. This study will contribute to an understanding of the all India public health scenario of the pre-independence years, and will be of interest to scholars of history, sociology, community health, gender studies, and South Asian studies, as well as to health workers and NGOs.

This study draws on extensive archival research to explore the social history of industrial labor in colonial India through the lens of well-being. Focusing on the cotton millworkers in Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book moves beyond trade union politics and examines the complex ways in which the broader colonial society considered the subject of worker well-being. As the author shows, worker well-being projects unfolded in the contexts of British Empire, Indian nationalism, extraordinary infant mortality, epidemic diseases, and uneven urban development. Srivastava emphasizes that worker well-being discourses and practices strove to reallocate resources and enhance the productive and reproductive capacities of the nation’s labor power. She demonstrates how the built urban environment, colonial local governance, public health policies, and deeply gendered local and transnational voluntary reform programs affected worker wellbeing practices and shaped working class lives.

Health and medicine cannot be understood without considering the role of nurses, both as professionals and as working women. In India, unlike other countries, nurses have suffered an exceptional degree of neglect at the hands of state, a situation that has been detrimental to the quality of both rural and urban health care. Charting the history of the development of nursing in India over 100 years, Indian Sisters examines the reasons why nurses have so consistently been sidelined and excluded from health care governance and policymaking. The book challenges the routine suggestion that nursing’s poor status is mainly attributable to socio-cultural factors, such as caste, limitations on female mobility and social taboos. It argues instead that many of its problems are due to an under-achieved relationship between a patriarchal state on the one hand, and weak professional nursing organisations shaped by their colonial roots on the other. It also explores how the recent phenomenon of large-scale emigration of nurses to the West (leading to better pay, working conditions and career prospects) has transformed the profession, lifting its status dramatically. At the same time, it raises questions about the implications of emigration for the fate of health care system in India. An important contribution to the growing academic genre of nursing history, the book is essential reading for scholars and students of health care, the history of medicine, gender and women’s studies, sociology, and migration studies. It will also be useful to policymakers and health professionals.

This is the first full-length monograph to examine the history of colonial medicine in India from the perspective of veterinary health. The history of human health in the subcontinent has received a fair amount of attention in the last few decades, but nearly all existing texts have completely ignored the question of animal health. This book will not only fill this gap, but also provide fresh perspectives and insights that might challenge existing arguments. At the same time, this volume is a social history of cattle in India. Keeping the question of livestock at the centre, it explores a range of themes such as famines, agrarian relations, urbanisation, middle-class attitudes, caste formations etc. The overall aim is to integrate medical history with social history in a way that has not often been attempted.

This volume provides a literary-cum-historiographical analysis of epidemics and pandemics. It looks at folklore, tribal folktales, eyewitness accounts, memoirs and missionary writings from India and the west to explore the history of some of the major outbreaks in history. The chapters focus on the impact of outbreaks such as plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and COVID-19, upon the material life of people, their social dislocation and their complex responses to such crises. The book studies the role of pandemics in pushing scientists, social actors and littérateurs to develop new paradigms in knowledge generation, theories of environmental dislocation and the economic slide. It examines themes such as changes in the perception of epidemic diseases across different periods of history, popular responses to state intervention during epidemics, gendering epidemics, as well as the impact of rumours during epidemics. An important contribution to the social history of health and medicine, the volume will be useful for students and researchers of cultural studies and medical anthropology, public health, literature, history of pandemics and epidemics, sociology of medicine and South Asian studies.