The New Cambridge History of India. Vol. 3, part 5: Science, Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India (review)

David Arnold. The New Cambridge History of India. Vol. 3, part 5: Science, Technology, and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 234 pp. $59.95.

Since the appearance of his article "Cholera and Colonialism in British India" in 1986, ¹ David Arnold has been recognized as the United Kingdom's leading specialist on the history of medicine in India. In 1993 he published Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, in which he equated the particular medical and public health ideas that the British used in India with "scientific knowledge and power." ² Going further, he held that "medicine needs to be understood as an influential and authoritative vehicle, not just for the transmission of Western ideas and practices to India but also for the generation and propagation of Western ideas about India" ³ Here, then, Arnold gave readers no cause to think that Viceroy and Governor General Lord Curzon was less than fair when in 1899 he claimed that the British gift of western medicine to India fully legitimated the British presence on the subcontinent. ⁴

In the present book, Arnold in seven chapters examines the history of "science," technology, and medicine from the time of the East India Company (1600 C.E.) to the end of the Raj in 1947. Of particular interest are his introductory remarks, in which he sees "science" as a cultural artifact (pp. 1-2); chapter 3, "Western Medicine in an Indian Environment"; the subsection on "Medical Science" in chapter 5; and the subsection on "Tropical Medicine and Public Health" in chapter 6.

At first reading, Arnold writes fluently and persuasively; the second time around, however, one realizes that he often says one thing and then goes on to say the opposite later on. The general drift of this book is that the British medical establishment in India did very well, all things considered. But near the end of the volume Arnold cites the Bhore Report of 1946, which, he says, pointed out that

the death rate in British India was nearly twice that in England and Wales, infant mortality stood almost three times higher, and life expectancy at birth was less than half. . . . [The Report] considered that at least half India's existing mortality was "preventible and should therefore be prevented." (p. 204)

This would lead an unbiased reader to conclude that imperial medicine had failed India--yet that is not the overall impression Arnold apparently seeks to convey.

As someone who has been conducting research in the pleasant surroundings of the India Office in the British Library on and off since it reopened in August 1998 (after a two-year closure), I find it odd to read in a book published in May 2000 that the India Office Library is "now defunct" (p. xi). Why was this claim made? In his accounts of tropical diseases, Arnold seldom quotes from the India Office copies of the annual sanitary "reports" sent in by officials in the provinces and in the Raj capital, nor does he quote from the Army Sanitary Commission "reviews" of these reports. It was these "reviews," written in London and sent out to the governors and sanitary officials in India, that did much to ensure that medical people in the periphery (India) did the bidding of Whitehall.

Arnold states that James McNabb Cuningham was sanitary commissioner from 1866 to 1884 (p. 59). But in fact in 1866-67 Cuningham was on probation, serving merely as "officiating sanitary commissioner." ⁵ If Arnold had consulted the acting sanitary commissioner's "report" for 1867, ⁶ he would have found that Cuningham (working in alliance with A. C. C. DeRenzy, sanitary commissioner for the Punjab) actively intervened in the cholera epidemic set off at that year's Hardwar Fair. In his campaign of 1867, Cuningham fully accepted the modified...