Leprosy is a neglected topic in the burgeoning field of the history of medicine and the colonized body. Leprosy in Colonial South India is not only a history of an intriguing and dramatic endemic disease, it is a history of colonial power in nineteenth-century British India as seen through the lens of British medical and legal encounters with leprosy and its sufferers in south India. Leprosy in Colonial South India offers a detailed examination of the contribution of leprosy treatment and legislative measures to negotiated relationships between indigenous and British medicine and the colonial impact on indigenous class formation, while asserting the agency of the poor and vagrant leprous classes in their own history.

An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the believed spread of leprosy. Across the empire this involved isolating victims of the disease in 'colonies', often on offshore islands. Discussion of the segregation of lepers is then extended to analogous examples of this practice, which, it is argued, has been an essential part of the repertoire of colonialism in the modern period. The book also examines literary representations of leprosy in Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century writing, and concludes with a discussion of traveller-writers such as R. L. Stevenson and Graham Greene who described and fictionalised their experience of staying in a leper colony.

The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

Psychiatric provision at Trivandrum in the early twentieth century -- Formal classification and treatment of patients -- Institutional trends and statistics -- The Orissan states - "something rotten somewhere"--Conclusion -- Index

This book explores the experiential and affective dimensions of structural transformation in South Asia through contemporary and historical accounts of life, ageing, illness, and death. The contributions to this book include analyses from various regions in South Asia, and topics discussed uncover how people’s experiences of life, ageing, illness, and death are entangled with the technology of governance, biomedicine, neoliberal restructuring and other national/international policies. Structured in three parts – governance, technology, and citizenship; well-being and restructuring of the social; waiting, hesitation, and hope as attitudes in facing the precariousness and fundamental uncertainty of life – the book brings to light the ways in which people face and continue to engage with their own and others’ lives cautiously, waveringly, but with a sense of hope. A novel contribution to the study of how people struggle or navigate their lives through the conditions of inequity and precariousness in South Asia, this book will be of interest to researchers studying anthropology, sociology, history, medical and development studies of South Asia, as well as to those interested in cultural and social theory.

When encountering unfamiliar environments in India and the Philippines, the British and the Americans wrote extensively about the first taste of mango and meat spiced with cumin, the smell of excrement and coconut oil, the feel of humidity and rough cloth against skin, the sound of bells and insects, and the appearance of dark-skinned natives and lepers. So too did the colonial subjects they encountered perceive the agents of empire through their senses and their skins. Empire of course involved economics, geopolitics, violence, a desire for order and greatness, a craving for excitement and adventure. It also involved an encounter between authorities and subjects, an everyday process of social interaction, political negotiation, policing, schooling, and healing. While these all concerned what people thought about each other, perceptions of others, as Andrew Rotter shows, were also formed through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In this book, Rotter offers a sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of their rule to its end (1857-1947) and the Americans in the Philippines from annexation to independence (1898-1946). The British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what they judged backward societies, and they believed that a vital part of the civilizing process was to properly prioritize the senses and to ensure them against offense or affront. Societies that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed unwholesome food in unmannerly ways were unfit for self-government. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily advanced Anglo-Americans to educate them before formally withdrawing their power. Indians and Filipinos had different ideas of what constituted sensory civilization and to some extent resisted imperial efforts to impose their own versions. What eventually emerged were compromises between these nations' sensory regimes. A fascinating and original comparative work, Empires of the Senses offers new perspectives on imperial history.

This collection of essays weaves together several themes related to the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. Its focus ranges from analysing Europe's relationship with India's indigenous medical systems, to case studies of two mental asylums(in Madras and Lucknow), the location of the leprosy asylum, the technological aspects and social implications of the colonial vaccination policy, and to colonial interventions related specifically to cholera and plague in the pilgrimage centres of puri and pandharpur. It also examine indigenous initiatives associated with the Indian drug industry and the Unani medical system and their interactions with the colonial health establishment and modern medicine. Besides charting out hiterto unexplored areas in the history and historiography of colonial medicine and its articulation with indigenous systems, this book demonstrates the rich possibilities of inter-disciplinary research. Of particular interest to the specialist reader, it is also useful to those working on modern India history, cultural studies and sociology.

Angela Ki Che Leung's meticulous study begins with the classical annals of the imperial era, which contain the first descriptions of a feared and stigmatized disorder modern researchers now identify as leprosy. She then tracks the relationship between the disease and China's social and political spheres (theories of contagion prompted community and statewide efforts at segregation); religious traditions (Buddhism and Daoism ascribed redemptive meaning to those suffering from the disease), and evolving medical discourse (Chinese doctors have contested the disease's etiology for centuries). Leprosy even pops up in Chinese folklore, attributing the spread of the contagion to contact with immoral women. Leung next places the history of leprosy into a global context of colonialism, racial politics, and "imperial danger." A perceived global pandemic in the late nineteenth century seemed to confirm Westerners' fears that Chinese immigration threatened public health. Therefore battling to contain, if not eliminate, the disease became a central mission of the modernizing, state-building projects of the late Qing empire, the nationalist government of the first half of the twentieth century, and the People's Republic of China. Stamping out the curse of leprosy was the first step toward achieving "hygienic modernity" and erasing the cultural and economic backwardness associated with the disease. Leung's final move connects China's experience with leprosy to a larger history of public health and biomedical regimes of power, exploring the cultural and political implications of China's Sino-Western approach to the disease.

Since the 1980s there has been a continual engagement with the history and the place of western medicine in colonial settings and non-western societies. In relation to South Asia, research on the role of medicine has focussed primarily on regions under direct British administration. This book looks at the ‘princely states’ that made up about two fifths of the subcontinent. Two comparatively large states, Mysore and Travancore – usually considered as ‘progressive’ and ‘enlightened’ – and some of the princely states of Orissa – often described as ‘backward’ and ‘despotic’ – have been selected for analysis. The authors map developments in public health and psychiatry, the emergence of specialised medical institutions, the influence of western medicine on indigenous medical communities and their patients and the interaction between them. Exploring contentious issues currently debated in the existing scholarship on medicine in British India and other colonies, this book covers the ‘indigenisation’ of health services; the inter-relationship of colonial and indigenous paradigms of medical practice; the impact of specific political and administrative events and changes on health policies. The book also analyses British medical policies and the Indian reactions and initiatives they evoked in different Indian states. It offers new insights into the interplay of local adaptations with global exchanges between different national schools of thought in the formation of what is often vaguely, and all too simply, referred to as 'western' or 'colonial' medicine. A pioneering study of health and medicine in the princely states of India, it provides a balanced appraisal of the role of medicine during the colonial era. It will be of interest to students and academics studying South Asian and imperial and commonwealth history; the history of medicine; the sociology of health and healing; and medical anthropology, social policy, public health, and international politics.