Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911 (review)

Anil Kumar. Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1998. 246 pp. $39.95.

Medicine and the Raj, while a welcome addition to the increasing literature on colonialism in India, seems a déjà vu picture of British medical policies in India, in terms of its ideas, sources, and style of presentation. In the first chapter, Anil Kumar provides a frail account of medical education in India, with facts about the Native Medical Institution (NMI) that are already well known to scholars in the field. Individual sections in this chapter are not hypothesis-driven, leaving gaps in the extent of information conveyed to the readers. In Calcutta and Bombay, for instance, Western medical education had a significant, albeit "parochial," impact on the Indian population, with the bhadralok and local wealthy elites as its prime beneficiaries. ¹ Also, the abolition of the NMI in 1835 occurred alongside the transfer of indigenous medical classes to separate schools, indicating that the traditional systems were not "dismissed as primitive and obsolete" (p. 75).

Chapter 2 offers a historical account of the growth of hospitals in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, but with no allusion to its relation to changes in the patterns of medical education that were a necessary prelude to employment of the British and civilian population in hospitals. In addition, it may not be appropriate to say that "of all the branches of Western medicine, surgery was the most popular" (p. 102), for we know that although Western medicine made rapid advances in its art and practice, the significance of these discoveries was not appreciated until the turn of the twentieth century. Also, the clientele of Western medicine comprised either those trained in Western sciences, or supporters of Western medical science who incorporated indigenous medicine as part of the nationalist and revivalist movement in British India. The discussion on pharmacy in this chapter would serve better as a separate chapter, since the British pursued an extensive drug policy in India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the publication in 1813 of Whitelaw Ainslie's Materia Medica of Hindoostan. Vaids and hakeems were employed in hospitals and dispensaries, where they could prescribe indigenous drugs as part of extending medical relief to the local population.

The evolution of the Indian Medical Service, the process of Indianization, and the discrimination of the subassistant surgeons against the European apothecaries are candidly described in chapter 3. The topic of the next chapter is the development of medical research in relation to dynamism in epidemic-disease situations during British India. Mass vaccination, however, was never "an ideal opportunity to state interventionism to colonize the Indian body" (p. 168) because of religious resistance from orthodox Hindus. Also, since colonial rule was characterized by a curious interplay between the colonial imperatives, Western medical science, and indigenous medicine, political hegemony seemed unattainable in the Indian context. In the concluding chapter, to say that "the rulers primarily concentrated on how to provide the best of hygienic sanitary and medical facilities to the military and civil population of their own race" (p. 216) is an overstatement. True, this is how the medical policies were initiated, as in Bengal, but the benefits gradually accrued to the Indian population, the indigenous practitioners, and the indigenous medical systems.

In sum, this is an incomplete study of colonial medical policies. Missing is an emphasis on the process of dynamism in Western medicine as a result of its confrontation with the professionalizing indigenous medical traditions in the vastly different culture into which it was introduced.

Poonam Bala
Case Western Reserve University

Note

1. See Poonam Bala, "Colonisation and Medical Systems in Bengal," in Colonisation and Its Impact on Psychiatry, ed. D. Bhugra and R. Mallett (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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