Focusing on India and South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the essays in this collection address power and enforced modernity as applied to medicine. Clashes between traditional methods of healing and the practices brought in by colonizers are explored across both territories. Chapters address issues of education, public health, autonomy and the transfer of knowledge, using case studies on birth-control, plague, human-animal diseases, AIDS, the legal system and the treatment of the mentally ill to compare and contrast these ex-British colonies.

"'the book performs the important task of bringing together a number of interesting research projects, and will be of interest to researchers and teachers not only in the field of medical history, but also imperialism and law, colonial knowledge formation and trans-national connections.'"