This volume interrogates the foundational categories that have come to define medical science in modern South Asia. It seeks to probe issues such as what constitutes the medical, in which context, and who defines it. This is achieved through case studies that range from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, from colonial Bengal and British Burma to present-day Andaman Islands and Ladakh. By examining the close interactions between political authorities, corporeal knowledge, and objects of governance in a sustained manner, the domains of the medical and the non-medical are revealed to be more blurred and porous than apparent. This provides us with new perspectives on the co-production of medicine and social worlds by actors and agencies in specific times and places.
Introduction: Locating the Medical; I. Production of the Medical; Sociological Description and the Forensics of Sexuality; Treacherous Minds, Submissive Bodies: Corporeal Technologies and Human Experimentation in Colonial India; Confessions of the Unfriendly Spleen: Medicine, Violence, and That Mysterious Organ of Colonial India; II. Enactments of the Medical; State Medicine or Medical State? A Prison Epidemic in Colonial Burma, 1881; Dr. Kar, I presume!: Medical Narratives from the Jarawa Tribal Reserve; III. Rethinking Disconnections and Continuities; The Making of an Eclectic Archive: Epistemologies of Global Knowledge in the Papers of J.P. Walker (1823-1906); Absence, Abundance, and Excess: Substances and Sowa Rigpa in Ladakh since the 1960s; Colonizing Cannabis: Medication, Taxation, Intoxication, and Oblivion, c. 1839-1955; IV. Contours of the Medical; Re-thinking the Medical through the Lens of the Indigenous: Narratives from Mahanubhav Healing Shrines in Maharashtra, India; Vernacularizing Political Medicine: Locating the Medical betwixt the Literal and the Literary in Two Texts on the Burdwan Fever, Bengal c. 1870s; Technology and Health in Late Colonial India; Afterword: Making the Medical; Notes on Editors and Contributors; Index;
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