Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914 / Edition 1

by Mark Harrison

Overview

This is the first major study of public health in British India. It covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes toward India and its inhabitants, and the way in which these were reflected in medical literature and medical policy; the fate of public health at the local level under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book places medicine within the context of debates about the government of India, and relations between rulers and ruled, and in emphasizing the active role of the indigenous population it differs significantly from other work in this subject area.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521466882
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/25/1994
Series:	Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Harrison, Mark (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine)

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction; 1. The Indian medical service; 2. Tropical hygiene: disease theory and prevention in nineteenth-century India; 3. The foundations of public health in India: crisis and constraint; 4. Cholera theory and sanitary policy; 5. Quarantine, pilgrimage, and colonial trade: India 1866–1900; 6. Professional visions and political realities, 1896–1914; 7. Public health and local self-government; 8. The politics of health in Calcutta, 1876–1899; Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

"A scholarly, extensively researched, well-annotated, and amply referenced work, and a valuable resource." Choice

"Public Health in British India is a commendable work marked by its substantial scholarly apparatus — fifty pages of notes, extensive utilization of primary sources, several graphs, and illustrations....this is a work of solid scholarship and should spawn historiographic research in the British colonial context. It is highly recommended for scholars and students of the Indian colonial history of preventive medicine." The Annals of the American Academy

"[Harrison's] arguments are well made and well supported by an impressive range of sources from contemporary medical journals to memoirs...The result is a solid contribution to the history of health and of imperialism." Histoire sociale

From the Publisher