Akarnan: The Stethoscope and Making of Modern Ayurveda, Bengal, c. 1894–1952

The histories of modern medical technologies have largely been studied exclusively within the biomedical context. Yet historians of medicine have increasingly demonstrated that a number of non-biomedical therapeutic traditions—Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine to name only two—have attained their own distinctive modernity. How has the incorporation of various medical technologies affected these neo-traditional medicines? What is the relationship between technologies and the body knowledge in non-biomedical therapeutics? Do shared technologies such as the stethoscope reveal the same bodily facts in biomedical and Ayurvedic contexts? These are some of the questions explored in this article by focusing on the uptake of the stethoscope in modern Ayurvedic medicine in Bengal. In the process the article also describes the emergence of a new sonic body in modern Ayurveda.