Western Medicine and Colonial Society

Book excerpt: Western Medicine and Colonial Society studies the social and political environment that spurred the development of hospitals and asylums in Calcutta under the East India Company's rule from c.1757 to 1860. Over the past few decades, academic research on the medical history of colonial India has concentrated mostly on the public health policy of the colonial government and the ingenious contrivance between colonial power and medicine in the formation of an empire, while neglecting the history of hospitals in the colonies. The present work attempts to bridge this gap by tracing the trajectories of hospital formation for the indigenous population, beginning with the early military and European hospitals. The book also focuses on the growth of dispensaries in the suburbs of Calcutta, as well as speciality hospitals in the city. Based on a thorough examination of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records preserved in India and the UK, this volume attempts to link the urban development of Calcutta, as the second capital of the Empire, with the social, political and cultural forces that fashioned the process of institutional health care in the city, and which became an important legacy for the organization of health care after India's Independence.