Medicine has always been a significant tool of an empire. This book focuses on the issue of the contestation of knowledge, and examines the non-Western responses to Western medicine. The decolonised states wanted Western medicine to be established with Western money, which was resisted by the WHO. The attribution of an African origin to AIDS is related to how Western scientists view the disease as epidemic and sexually threatening. Veterinary science, when applied to domestic stock, opens up fresh areas of conflict which can profoundly influence human health. Pastoral herd management was the enemy of land enclosure and efficient land use in the eyes of the colonisers. While the native Indians of the United States were marginal participants in the delivery or shaping of health care, the Navajo passively resisted Western medicine by never giving up their own religion-medicine. The book discusses the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in eradicating the yellow fever in Brazil and hookworm in Mexico. The imposition of Western medicine in British India picked up with plague outbreaks and enforced vaccination. The plurality of Indian medicine is addressed with respect to the non-literate folk medicine of Rajasthan in north-west India. The Japanese have been resistant to the adoption of the transplant practices of modern scientific medicine. Rumours about the way the British were dealing with plague in Hong Kong and Cape Town are discussed. Thailand had accepted Western medicine but suffered the effects of severe drug resistance to the WHO treatment of choice in malaria.

Examines the range of non-Western responses to Western medicine across the spectrum of Western imperialist influence, from Japan in the East to the Navajo of North America in the West. The text aims to make a contribution to the debate about the relationship between knowledge and.

This volume shows how the study of medicine can provide new insights into colonial identity, and the possibility of accomodating multiple perspectives on identity within a single narrative.

Imperial Contagions argues that there was no straightforward shift from older, enclavist models of colonial medicine to a newer emphasis on prevention and treatment of disease among indigenous populations as well as European residents. It shows that colonial medicine was not at all homogeneous "on the ground" but was riven with tensions and contradictions. Indigenous elites contested and appropriated Western medical knowledge and practices for their own purposes. Colonial policies contained contradictory and cross-cutting impulses. This book challenges assumptions that colonial regimes were uniformly able to regulate indigenous bodies and that colonial medicine served as a "tool of empire."

This book examines the changing landscape of evangelical British missionary education in the British Empire of the nineteenth century. It clearly It argues that over the course of the nineteenth century many aspects of mission schools were secularised, leading missionary societies to question the ambivalent legacy of mission schools.

Western medicine is widely thought of as a coherent and unified field in which beliefs, definitions, and judgments are shared. This book debunks this myth with an interdisciplinary and intercultural collection of essays that reveals the significantly varied ways practitioners of "conventional" Western medicine handle bodies, study test results, configure statistics, and converse with patients.

This book, first published in 2006, is an authoritative description of the important changes in Western medicine over the past two centuries.