Nationalizing the body
Subtitle: the medical market, print and daktari medicine
By: Projit Bihari Mukharji.
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: London; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 351
ISBN-13: 9781843313151; 9781843313236
Subjects: Traditional medicine -- South Asia; Healers -- South Asia; Indigenous physicians -- South Asia; Body, Human -- Social aspects -- South Asia; Bengali (South Asian people) -- Medicine; Bengali (South Asian people) -- Health and hygiene; Bengali literature -- South Asia; Medical literature -- South Asia; Public health -- South Asia; Medical policy -- South Asia; South Asia -- Colonization; South Asia -- Social conditions
Description: "[Book title] revisits the history of 'western' medicine in colonial South Asia through the lives, writings and practice of the numerous Bengali daktars who adopted and practised it. Refusing to see 'western' medicine as an alienated appendage of the colonial state, this book explores how 'western' medicine was vernacularised. It argues that a burgeoning medical market and a medical publishing industry together gave daktari medicine a social identity which did not solely derive from its association with the state. Accessing many of the best-known ideas and episodes of colonial South Asian medical history, it seeks to understand how daktari medicine re-positioned the colonized bodies as nationalized bodies."--Back cover.
Table of contents: title: Chapter i- healers in context: forgotten pioneers; title: Chapter ii- daktari prints: the world of bengali printing and the multiple inscriptions of daktari medicine; title: Chapter iii- contagious nationalism: contagion and the actualization of the nation; title: Chapter iv- political plague: diagnosing a neo-hindu modernity; title: Chapter v- endemic commerce: cholera and the medical market; title: Chapter vi- dhatu dourbalya: the rhizoid pathologies of weakness; title: Conclusion.