This verse encapsulates the concerns of the ‘educated section’ about the poverty and drug-addiction that affected the health of the rural population. It is one of the examples of many interventions in newspapers, journals and Hindi literature on issues related to medicine and health care during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Amongst the English educated intelligentsia were the emerging ‘professional classes’, that is doctors, lawyers, and teachers, seeking to carve out a niche for themselves in the society. They invoked their special qualifications to lend authority to the position they took in debates relating to eugenic health, medical practices, and sanitation. Sometimes this ‘scientific’ knowledge was proved in contrast to ‘superstitious’ beliefs. But sometimes, on a more persuasive note, an effort was made to represent it as an extension or a confirmation of traditional beliefs and practices relating to health.

This chapter explores the engagement of the ‘educated section’ of Banaras with western medicine, modern notions of diseases and their cures, and encounters with medical sciences and new medical technologies such as the thermometer and stethoscope.