This book focuses on the social history of medicine, reflecting the multiplicity and complexity of social interaction and encounter between indigenous and western medicines. Exploring a variety of engagements and interventions in the patronage and professionalization of modern medical science and the institutional interventions, it also highlights the contradictions of harmony co-existing in the public sphere. Focusing on the borders and boundaries marked by the colonial government in the medical profession, this study analyses how Indian allopathic and indigenous medicines practitioners struggled with these demarcations. The present work is an attempt to understand India through a prism of Banaras as a case study. An advertisement of Amritdhara in the Hindu newspaper, Abhyudaya, published under the editorial aegis of ‘Mahamana’ Malaviya, aroused my historical quest, showing how a medical consumer was created and how the two systems could compete with each other. Questions were raised as to whether the indigenous system could put up a fight at all, as the western medicine system had the moral and economic force of imperialism with it. With these questions, I ventured on an untraversed path of social history of medicine in which I scanned various contemporary journals, newspapers and interviewed indigenous medical practitioners about their trade practices and how they dealt with modern notions of trademarks, patent laws and several other issues brought along by western medicine.