Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility by Narin Hassan (review)

Narin Hassan analyzes texts by British women traveling to or residing in the Middle East and India in order to delineate the ways in which they gained access to and authority over indigenous women by providing medical aid. Her account begins with women travelers to the Middle East in the mid-nineteenth century and concludes with the emergence of Indian women physicians in the 1880s. Her underlying thesis is that the “popular Western knowledge of hygiene, medicine, and sanitation” that these women brought with them “was distinctively made use of—on their own bodies and native bodies—in ways that authorized and supported their positions overseas” (59). Hassan begins with Mary Wortley Montagu’s description of the ways in which elderly Turkish women inoculated their relatives, especially children, with pulverized smallpox scabs so they contracted a mild form of smallpox and acquired future immunity. When Montagu remarked that she would inoculate her own child, she prefigured British women in the nineteenth century who assumed responsibility for the health of their families and those of other women at home and abroad. By the mid-nineteenth century Sophia Lane Poole (in Egypt), Harriet Martineau (in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria), and Emmeline Lott (a governess in Egypt) depicted harems as confining and insalubrious sites of debilitated mothers and diseased children. In 1864 an anonymous “lady resident” postulated that British women were responsible for the health of their families, especially children, while in India (36–37). Gradually other authors urged them to be responsible for the health of Indian women and children.

In chapter 2 Hassan delineates the ways in which British women used maternal objects such as medicine chests and texts to become “doctresses” of Indian women and children (57). Disdaining the subordinate roles of nurse and midwife, Lucie Duff Gordon created the title of “doctress.” Emphasizing her success among patients in Egypt from 1862 to around 1864, she was particularly proud of her lavement machine that cleansed its users of excrement and disease. Traveling with her husband in Syria and Palestine, Isabel Burton considered the pills and tinctures in her medicine chest superior to indigenous medicines even though the pills might have contained ingredients first produced in India.

Dr. Mary Scharlieb, who had accompanied her barrister husband to India, graduated in the first class of four women from the madras medical school in 1878. After practicing in India from 1883 to 1887, she returned to London without her husband and had a distinguished career as a Harley street physician. In her Woman’s Words to Women on the Care of Their Health in England and in India (1895) Scharlieb, herself a mother, emphasized that motherhood was the duty of women, but that the roles of mother and physician were not incompatible. Constructing Indian women as passive, she postulated that social reform could be achieved through medicine and that British and even Indian women physicians could be successful. Although her close analysis of Scharlieb’s writings is astute, Hassan unfortunately ignores class and caste distinctions here and elsewhere.

Scharlieb is stated to have founded the first hospital for women in India. However, by the mid-1840s male physicians had established maternity hospitals in Calcutta and Madras. These hospitals attracted low-caste and Eurasian women; the Victoria Hospital for Caste and Purdah Women established by Scharlieb catered by contrast to high-caste women. Inaugurated in 1885, the Countess of Dufferin’s Fund invoked, as did Scharlieb in her writings, the concern of Queen Victoria as a mother and monarch to provide access for Indian women to modern medicine. But the Dufferin hospitals also targeted secluded and by implication high-caste women as its clientele.

Chapter 4 focuses on Krupabai Satthianadhan, a Tamil Christian woman, whose two novels and assorted essays in English provide the archive for Hassan’s argument that “doctoring was imagined to liberate select, privileged native women in ways that colluded with the expectations of both late nineteenth...