Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India

by David Arnold

In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers.

Focusing on three major epidemic diseases―smallpox, cholera, and plague―Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions.

By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, India, Academic, World History, Bodies

368 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 1993

About the author

David Arnold is professor emeritus of Asian and global history in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Among his numerous works are Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India; Gandhi; and The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856.

Reviews

[Marva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a grand work of history unraveling the process of colonization of the body, the untold history of colonialism and biomedicine in India. It explicates the complicated history of biomedicine, the hegemony of the state as well as later on the native elites, the reactions of the natives through resistance, evasion, appropriation etc. One major drawback is that most of the literature the book is based on are the accounts of the British medical officers although Arnold's ways of critical reading bring out the inherent contradictions, reconstructing a reliable historical narrative. A must-read for medical humanities aspirants.

[Indumugi C · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read this piece long back on the Hypocrite Reader and since then wanted to read on the theme of colonial medicine: https://hypocritereader.com/95/tamara....

This book contains impeccable detail in both medical science and the State's responses to epidemics. Never read on colonial medicine before, but it is beautiful how David Arnold captures reactionary measures taken to save face during the bubonic plague, those same measures that were prescribed even for cholera times. A potential embargo on economic relations with other countries fueled quick-compliance and therefore, gave way for arbitrary laws and measures.

[Linda Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good, worth it if you care about medical history in context of colonialism or the history of epidemiology.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is rightfully seen as an essential book in the field of disease history. The best chapters are the case studies (smallpox, cholera, and plague), but his digression into hegemony (in the sense of Gramsci) is very lucid and intellectually stimulating.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for those interesting in colonization and the use of medical practice as a tool of colonial rule. In the Foucaultian spirit Arnold dissects the intersection of paternalistic medical policy and cultural denigration.