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Social History of Medicine Advance Access published online on May 27, 2009
Social History of Medicine, doi:10.1093/shm/hkp005
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved

Diabetes in the Tropics: Race, Place and Class in India, 1880–1965

David Arnold*

* Professor of Asian and Global History, Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. E-mail: d.arnold{at}warwick.ac.uk


  Abstract

Summary A disease predominantly of India's urban middle class and increasingly common in modern India, diabetes attracted little state medical attention either before or in the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947. It did, however, give rise to an extensive medical literature, generated by both Indian and British doctors, pathologists and medical researchers, who understood the disease not just in terms of class susceptibility and the consequences of colonial modernity, but also in relation to racial and environmental characteristics. The rise of ‘tropical diabetes’ in India thus reflected and exemplified a wider trend towards the racialisation and tropicalisation of Indian medical thought. Despite the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, prophylaxis and treatment of the disease in India suggested a continuing belief in a culturally distinctive approach to the disease.

Keywords: diabetes; race; tropics; tropical disease; governmentality; insulin


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