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Modernity, the State, and New Medical Histories in Non-European Contexts
Review products
The colonial life of pharmaceuticals: medicine and modernity in Vietnam. By Laurence Monnais, translated by Noémi Tousignant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x + 280. ISBN 9781108474665. £75.00 (hardcover).
Vernacular medicine in colonial India: family, market and homeopathy. By Shinjini Das. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 292. ISBN 9781108420624. £65.00 (hardcover).
Mass vaccination: citizen's bodies and state power in modern China. By Mary Augusta Brazelton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 237. ISBN 9781501739989. $47.95 (hardcover).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2023
Extract
Histories of medicine and science in the colonies have, conceptually and theoretically, travelled some distance in the last three decades. While public health and epidemics in certain Asian contexts,1 and mental health and medical stereotypes in the African case,2 appear to have preoccupied historians during the early years, there has been an increasing willingness to charter new paths and explore new possibilities. This has made the sub-discipline more exciting and inter-disciplinary – for example, the move away from the state and its discourses has led to an increased attention to other forms of medical treatments and their interactions with regional publics. The interdisciplinarity, too, is evident in seemingly innocuous changes. For instance, medical historians have begun to make more frequent use of the term ‘health’, which, until the noughties at least, was a concept mostly employed by sociologists and anthropologists. It is heartening to see that all four books under review, to a greater or lesser extent, bridge these divides in obvious and not-so-obvious ways.
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References
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3 This is, of course, reducing the huge diversity within post-colonial works, and is slightly unfair to their considerable contributions. These studies have certainly given us new strategies for re-reading historical sources, while also underlining the power of discourses. They have also highlighted the importance of the notion of resistance and agency, which have enriched historical writings.
4 See, for example, Harrison, Mark, Worboys, Michael, and Bhattacharya, Sanjoy, eds., Fractured states: smallpox, public health and vaccination policy in British India, 1800–1947 (Hyderabad, 2009)Google Scholar. This was not just true for the state, but also for non-state actors such as missionaries. See Ruramisai, Charumbira, ‘Administering medicine without a license: missionary women in Rhodesia's nursing history, 1890–1901’, Historian, 68 (2006), pp. 241–66Google Scholar; Proctor, J., ‘Scottish medical missionaries in South Arabia, 1886–1979’, Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42 (2006), pp. 103–21Google Scholar. In fact, even non-biomedical forms of medicine that were administered by European doctors (and therefore perceived as being linked to the state) attracted a huge clientele. See Ernst, Waltraud, ‘“Under the influence” in British India: James Esdaile's Mesmeric Hospital in Calcutta, and its critics’, Psychological Medicine, 25 (1995), pp. 1113–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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9 Proponents of homeopathy, such as Amritalal Basu, upheld it as ‘the only form of western medicine that the Hindus could happily consume without any fear of losing their faith’: Vernacular medicine in colonial India, p. 141.
10 One of the gaps in Das's work is the relative lack of attention to homeopathy in the mofussils, though she does mention it fleetingly at several places. To be fair, though, as a pioneering work on the theme, it certainly cannot be expected to cover such a wide range of issues.
11 In recent times, a similar argument has been made by David Arnold in his fascinating work on everyday technologies: Everyday technology: machines and the making of India's modernity (Chicago, IL, 2013).
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14 Harrison, Mark, Medicine and victory: British medical medicine in the Second World War (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar. Indeed, journals like Military Medicine are becoming increasingly popular, and new ones on similar themes are continuously coming into existence.
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16 As a specialist in modern Indian history, I could not help seeing a parallel between ‘political doctors’ in Indonesia and ‘political lawyers’ in India.
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18 One of the interesting things about Dutch rule in Indonesia was that it was possible, at least theoretically, to be naturalized as a Dutch citizen. However, the distinction between the two groups never completely disappeared in reality.
19 See, for example, Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis, eds., Medicine and the market in England and its colonies, c. 1450 – c. 1850 (Basingstoke, 2007); Ueyama, Takahiro, Health in the marketplace: professionalism, therapeutic desires, and medical commodification in late-Victorian London (Palo Alto, CA, 2010)Google Scholar. For an older work on medical markets, see Porter, Roy, Health for sale: quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Manchester, 1989)Google Scholar.
20 On the idea of multiple maternities, see Eisenstadt, S. N., ‘Multiple modernities’, Daedalus, 129 (2000), pp. 1–30Google Scholar; Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. L., ‘Theory from the south: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa’, Anthropological Forum, 22 (2012), pp. 113–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Our modernity’, SEPHIS/CODESRIA Lecture, Dakar, 1996; published online at: https://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/partha1.pdf (accessed 10 Dec. 2022).