Social History of Medicine Advance Access originally published online on November 13, 2007
Social History of Medicine 2007 20(3):505-524; doi:10.1093/shm/hkm077
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Beyond East and West. From the History of Colonial Medicine to a Social History of Medicine(s) in South Asia
* Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP, UK. E-mail: wernst{at}brookes.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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This article reflects on theories and methodologies that have characterised the field of the history of colonial medicine over the last couple of decades. It discusses the merits and flaws of hitherto predominant conceptual paradigms that concerned themselves mainly with issues of power, governmentality, the status of modernity and the ‘condition’ of the colonisers and the colonised. The recent shift in research focus from western or colonial medicine to the multiplicity of indigenous medicines is assessed as a potentially more nuanced, balanced and adequately theory-focused as well as evidence-driven approach. It is argued that the seemingly irreconcilable tension and at times unhelpful hostility between proponents of Fanonian and Foucaultian paradigms on the one hand and archival data-focused historians of medicine on the other needs to be overcome lest researchers continue to be caught up in either ideologically fraught and conceptually misleading east versus west bifurcations or narrowly framed local case studies. Rather than discerning the end of social history of medicine research on south Asia, the author suggests that there is much scope and indeed urgent need for a social history of medicines in south Asia that is guided by crisp theory and at the same time anchored in the richly textured fabric of a wide range of economic, political, cultural and socio-historical sources.
Keywords: indigenous medicine; modernity; subalternity; histoire croisee; transnationalism; historicism; globalisation