The emergence of Hippieism in the USA and then in Western Europe can be traced back to the end of the 1940s when Jack Kerouac introduced the term ‘Beat Generation’ to describe his social circle consisting of norm-breaking and anti-conformist youth in New York City. ‘Beat’, meaning beat down, was subculture slang from the world of those groups who saw themselves in that condition – petty thieves, hustlers, drug addicts, and other ‘down and outs’. However, for Kerouac and others within his circle, such as Allen Ginsberg, another well-known anti-conformist writer who opposed imperialism and traditional forms of sexual morality, ‘beat’ had a spiritual dimension which rejected the materialist and conformist trajectory that US society had taken after World War II. Behind this dimension were nostalgic visions of life in the USA to which society should return. The term faced distortions as it entered the public arena. In Kerouac’s response to these distortions, we get a sense of the meaning behind ‘beat culture’.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the story of Noah and the New Science. It begins with the contemporary discussions about the date of the flood and the calculations about the numbers of people from the time of the flood to the present. It continues with the late seventeenth-century debate about the universality of the flood. The issue of the date of the flood leads also to the problem of fossils and their relation to the flood of Noah, with particular attention to John Woodward’s An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the shifting time scales on the age of the earth during the eighteenth century cast doubt upon the role in the formation of the earth that had traditionally been ascribed to the flood, along with attempts to harmonise the Biblical story with the new age of the earth.

While exploring the historical relationship between the Burdwan fever and agriculture in Burdwan, a district in West Bengal, in connection with my PhD research in the 1990s at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, I was considerably excited and resolved to undertake a project on the history of kala-azar as my postdoctoral studies. I noticed the conflicting comments of contemporary physicians and health personnel on the nature of the Burdwan fever—some referring to it as malaria whereas others naming it kala-azar. Malaria in Bengal by then had already gripped the attention of historical scholarship, and some scholars were engaged in research on various aspects of malaria, including its epidemic episodes and endemicity. The history of kala-azar was rather a neglected field of historical enquiry even though there was abundant material on it. This sparked my interest and attracted my attention. After having completed my PhD, I started exploring the history of kala-azar and wrote a small piece on it towards the end of the 1990s. Subsequently, I undertook it as my postdoctoral project, came into contact with David Arnold, and applied for Commonwealth Fellowship to work with him on this subject. I was selected and was based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, to pursue my studies during 2002–2003, and thus began the trajectory of my postdoctoral work. I felt honoured to work with Professor Arnold, who was very supportive and generous with suggestions, and inspired me a lot to produce a book based on my work. Thus, the idea of this treatise was conceived way back in the early 2000s. It took a long time to produce this treatise since after gathering information on it in the United Kingdom's libraries and archives, I looked into some additional sources in India. Finally, the baby came out of the womb. I am grateful to Professor Arnold for his advice and assistance in completing the research successfully.

I am greatly indebted to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, London, for sponsoring my trip to and supporting my stay in London during 2002–2003, which gave me ample opportunities to use the esteemed libraries and archives in London. This facilitated my research at the British Library, Wellcome Library, London School of Tropical Medicine Library, and the British Medical Association archives in London.

The process of colonization made the colonial administration face terrible diseases in India that threatened the army, white civilians, and the economy of the colony, and generated tremendous insecurities and anxieties. Western medicine and medical men were brought to India to tackle the diseases and protect the ‘crown jewel’ of the British Empire. At the same time, the introduction of Western medicine into India by the British generated a host of complexities that have significance insofar as the history of medicine in colonial India is concerned. What was essential for combating the dreadful diseases was advanced medical knowledge, and it emerged from the sincere and sustained work of medical researchers in India. The scientific efforts of researchers were essential to enabling everything from the diagnosis of the illness to the development of therapeutic treatments. Only by the diligent research of medical scientists—whether it was quinine for malaria, smallpox or plague vaccinations, or anti-kala-azar drugs—was remedial chemotherapy known to the hospitals. The research yielded unquestionably enormous advantages, but to what extent the government appropriately utilized those gains to contain the diseases is another story entirely. It is the painstaking research of the IMS men and members of the Bengal Medical Service that brought to light what we know about kala-azar. Investigations undertaken by them continued until the end of British rule and produced a plethora of information about the disease, its chemotherapy, and its prognosis. This chapter focuses on the growth of medical research on black fever, or kala-azar, against the background of medical research in general in colonial India. It also seeks to shed light on the government's response to it and the extent the research reached fruition.

A new era in the history of fighting the fever began in 1903 when the kala-azar parasite was correctly identified. Thenceforth, further study on it made India one of the world's leading countries that produced enormous medical knowledge about this disease, thereby enriching the knowledge base of black fever. Despite the overwhelming wealth of information on this ailment, the colonial state in India and its subjects had to wage war against kala-azar till the end of colonial rule. Eastern India experienced serious medical intervention by the colonial administration to combat kala-azar, but the progress of the disease could not be checked successfully even in the late colonial period despite pursuing treatment campaigns and health propaganda. The administration failed to prevent its occurrence, though successful treatment from the 1920s saved innumerable people. The disease was rather widely prevalent despite the availability of all possible means to eliminate it. This raised doubt over the efficiency of the anti-kala-azar measures implemented by the health administration.

Despite the fact that the health policy of the British Indian government had certain limitations, the contribution and efficacy of Western medicine cannot be questioned. It had a liberating, though limited, role in the control of communicable diseases. It introduced modern scientific and medical knowledge and evoked interest among the local populace. The notion of public health was certainly attractive to the Indian elite and intelligentsia, who accepted some of its doctrines and wanted to see the principles of public health working in India. The developing concept of public health and hygiene, medical institutions and hospitals, IMS and subordinate medical services, and so on, provided an organized medical system and an iron framework of public health administration in independent India. It gave certain benefits to the Indian people. The Indian medical system was not as methodical, pervasive, and penetrative as Western medicine. Colonial medical research based on the method of experiment and observation carried out by experts on different diseases provided new knowledge about preventive and curative aspects of medicine and also about the containment of dreadful diseases.

Unquestionably, the government was sorely tempted to retaliate against the inroads of kala-azar and set forth plans and strategies for that purpose. Treatment was used as an effective tool to arrest the disease. The sustained and extensive treatment for kala-azar had a great effect on saving lives in the areas under study.

The introduction of Western medicine in India by British colonialism is a milestone in the history of modern India. Many of the new ideas of medical science—hospitals, health, hygiene, sanitation—came to India with colonialism. At the same time, there evolved an encounter between Western and indigenous medicines—a cultural encounter between India's traditional society and the West. The relationship between Western and Indian medical systems has always been a significant topic in medical history, and in recent decades historical studies have focused on this relationship. In his essay titled ‘Medicine and Orientalism: Perspectives on Europe's Encounter with Indian Medical Systems’, Mark Harrison deftly examines this topic. Discussing both collaboration and contradiction in the relationship between the two in the course of passing through several stages from the seventeenth century onwards, Harrison mentions that the Europeans’ attitude towards Indian systems of medicine underwent a change after 1820. Using ‘native’ medicinal herbs, examining Indian medical literature, and consulting practitioners of Indian medical systems, European physicians made substantial use of indigenous medical knowledge.

In 2019, a film about the life of Gholamreza Takhti (1930–1968), the champion wrestler from south Tehran, hit cinema screens across Iran. The popularity it enjoyed, the discussions about the past and present it triggered, and the forms of nostalgia it provoked underlined Takhti’s unique position in popular and intellectual conceptions of javānmardi and authenticity. His status as a national hero emerged from below during the Pahlavi period: ‘He enjoyed great popularity and respect in Iran amongst many sections of society – university students, merchants, large and small, the regular people and illiterate and semi-literate people’, stressed Sadegh Zibakalam, a public intellectual and professor of history at Tehran University, in a wide-ranging discussion published in the newspaper Shargh between him and its editor on the nostalgic imagery surrounding Takhti at the time of the film’s release.

In early 1978, Towards the Great Civilization, the last pre-revolutionary book written by Mohammad Reza Shah, was published amid great fanfare. To be sure, from the early 1970s, he increasingly spoke of this ‘great civilization’ and its elements, a significant number of which are found in his first work, Mission for My Country (1961), in his trial balloon aimed at the ideologization of the monarchy, Pahlavism (1966–1967) penned by Manuchehr Honarmand, and in the ideology of the Rastakhiz Party of Shah and People founded in 1975. Expressing great optimism about Iran’s future, the shah portrayed this Great Civilization as an Iranian modernity superior to that offered by the liberal and capitalist West and the communist East.

In late 1973, around 7:30 p.m., ten-year-old Nasrin, one of four children in a family living in central Tehran, finished her homework and went to the corner grocer to buy milk. After thirty minutes, she had not yet returned. Alarm bells ringing, the family went to find her. No trace of her was found. Into the next day, they continued the search until the evening when she showed up at the house in ripped clothes. Crying and shaking, she told her parents what happened. They took her to the police station.

Chapter 4 continues the theme of the preceding chapter in chronological order and seeks to expose the contrast between two coexisting theoretical frameworks: the clinical tradition, which still argued for the somatic basis of mental illnesses, and the emerging field of psychotherapy. The second part of the chapter examines the figuration of the ‘nervous child’, which recognised the importance of the environment in mental health.

In 1925, the Pahlavi era started amidst strong sentiments of temporally distant nostalgia among the literate class, intellectuals, and political figures for the civilizational grandeur and military puissance of pre-Islamic Iranian empires, Iran’s Golden Ages. These sentiments had emerged in the closing decades of Qajar rule given the deep discontent and uneasiness resulting from the stark contrast between these ages and the weak, wretched state into which Iran had fallen. Exemplifying this nostalgia in early official ideology were the dynastic name, Pahlavi, the name of the Persian language during the Sasanian period, the Pahlavi crown, modelled on that of Sasanian shahs, and systematic celebration of Ferdowsi’s Shahname. This distant nostalgia constituted a mobilizing force and historical justification for Pahlavi absolutism, which claimed it would return to Iran that grandeur and puissance through programmes of change from above.