Living With Epidemics In Colonial Bengal

Author : Arabinda Samanta
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351399659
Total Pages : 129 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal written by Arabinda Samanta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-09 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making epidemics in colonial Bengal as its entry point and drawing heavily on social, cultural and linguistic anthropology to understand the functions of health experiences, distribution of illness, prevention of sickness, social relations of therapeutic intervention and employment of pluralistic medical systems, the book interrogates the social construction of medical knowledge, politics of science, and the changing paradigm of relationship between health of the individual and the prerogatives of larger colonial economic formations. Smallpox, plague, cholera and malaria which visited colonial Bengal with epidemic vengeance, caught the people unaware, killed them in thousands, and changed the society and its demographic structures. The book shows how sometimes through mutual adaptation but more often by cultural contestation, people pulled on with their microbial fellow travellers, and how illness became metaphor for the social dangers of improper code of conduct, to be corrected only through personal expropriation of the sin committed, or by community worship of the deity supposedly responsible for it. As a result, Western medical science was often relegated to the background, and elaborate rites and rituals, supposedly having curative values, came to the forefront and were observed with much community fanfare. Epidemics were also interpreted as outcome of politically incorrect moves made by the ruling power. To right the wrongs, people very often resorted to social protest. The protest by the literati went sometimes muted when its members seem to be beneficiaries of the colonial government, but it turned out to be all the more violent when the people, who had no private axe to grind, took up the cudgel to fight it out.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Suranjan Das
Publisher : Primus Books
ISBN 13 : 9789390633135
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal written by Suranjan Das and published by Primus Books. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal is the third volume produced under the aegis of the Wellcome Trust (London) funded documentation project 'Western Medicine and Indigenous Society: History of Disease, Medicine and Public Health Policy in Colonial Eastern India, (1757-1947)'. While the first volume documented the context in which hospitals were established in Calcutta during the rule of the British East India Company, and the second analysed the trauma caused by tuberculosis in the public health system of twentieth-century India, the present volume brings together selections from official reports on cholera, malaria and smallpox-the three diseases which repeatedly struck colonial Bengal as epidemics. Its objective is to provide a useful resource for researchers, with ready entry points for reconstructing the incidence of these diseases, their mortality rates, social and economic effects as well as colonial medical interventions to contain them. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of studying epidemics that have struck human society in a historical continuum and the significance of the present collation needs to be viewed in this context. The book will be a welcome contribution to the rapidly developing field of History of Medicine.

Author : Sudip Bhattacharya
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443863092
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unseen Enemy written by Sudip Bhattacharya and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europeans in early colonial Bengal fell prey to new diseases that their limited pharmacopeia, based on an imperfect knowledge of physiology, often failed to treat. This book looks at clinical observations and theories by several English doctors, who, with the encouragement of the East India Company, strove to address these ailments. This enthralling story begins with John Woodall, who never voyaged to India but equipped the surgeons’ chests aboard ships sailing there, and ends with James Esdaile’s contentious work at the experimental Mesmeric Hospital he was permitted to set up briefly in Calcutta.

Author : Rohan Deb Roy
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107172365
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Malarial Subjects written by Rohan Deb Roy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how and why British imperial rule shaped scientific knowledge about malaria and its cures in nineteenth-century India. This title is also available as Open Access.

Author : Poonam Bala
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 179365123X
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Epidemic Encounters, Communities, and Practices in the Colonial World written by Poonam Bala and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume examine the nature and extent of disease on indigenous communities and local populations located within the vast regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a result of colonial sea power and colonial conquest. While this established a long-term impact of disease on populations, the essays also offer insights into the dynamics of these populations in resisting colonial intrusions and introduction of disease to newly-acquired territories.

Author : Apalak Das
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1003862241
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Empire and Leprosy in Colonial Bengal written by Apalak Das and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leprosy, widely mentioned in different religious texts and ancient scriptures, is the oldest scourge of humankind. Cases of leprosy continue to be found across the world as the most crucial health problem, especially in India and Brazil. There are a few maladies that eventually turn into social disquiets, and leprosy is undoubtedly one of them. This book traces the dynamics of the interface between colonial policy on leprosy and religion, science and society in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries. It explores how the idea of ‘degeneration’ and the ‘desolates’ shaped the colonial legality of segregating ‘lepers’ in Indian society. The author also delves into the treatments of leprosy that were often transfigured from ‘original’ English texts, written by American or British medical professionals, into Bengali. Rich in archival resources, this book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Indian history, public health, social history, medical humanities, medical history and colonial history.

Author : Nishi Pulugurtha
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000810801
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Literary Representations of Pandemics, Epidemics and Pestilence written by Nishi Pulugurtha and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-23 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disease, pestilence and contagion have been an integral component of human lives and stories. This book explores the articulations and representations of the vulnerability of life or the trauma of death in literature about epidemics both from India and around the world. This book critically engages with stories and narratives that have dealt with pandemics or epidemics in the past and in contemporary times to see how these texts present human life coming to terms with upheaval, fear and uncertainty. Set in various places and times, the literature examined in this book explores the themes of human suffering and resilience, inequality, corruption, the ruin of civilizations and the rituals of grief and remembrance. The chapters in this volume cover a wide spatio-temporal trajectory analysing the writings of Fakir Mohan Senapati and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Jack London, Albert Camus, Margaret Atwood, Sarat Chand, Pandita Ramabai and Christina Sweeney-Baird, among others. It gives readers a glimpse into both grounded and fantastical realities where disease and death clash with human psychology and where philosophy, politics and social values are critiqued and problematized. This book will be of interest to students of English literature, social science, gender studies, cultural studies, psychology, society, politics and philosophy. General readers too will find this exciting as it covers authors from across the world.

Author : Sathyaraj Venkatesan
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 9811912963
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation written by Sathyaraj Venkatesan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited book analyses how artists, authors, and cultural practitioners have responded to and represented episodes of epidemics/pandemics through history. Covering a broad range of notable epidemics/pandemics (black death, cholera, Influenza, AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19), the chapters examine the cultural representations of epidemics and pandemics in different contexts, periods, languages, media, and genres. Interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on perspectives from medicine, literature, medical anthropology, philosophy of medicine, and cultural theory, the book investigates and emphasizes the urgent need to reflect on past catastrophes caused by such outbreaks. By delving into cultural history, it re-examines how societies and communities have responded in the past to species-threatening epidemics/pandemics. Sure to be of interest to lay readers as well as students and researchers, this work situates epidemics and pandemics outbreaks within the contexts of culture and narrative, and their complex and layered representation, commenting on intersections of contagion, culture, and community. It offers a cross-cultural, global, and comparative analysis of the trajectories, histories and responses to various epidemics/pandemics that impacted people worldwide.

Author : Deepak Kumar
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 100935065X
Total Pages : 183 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Science and Society in Modern India written by Deepak Kumar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book delineates the role and place of the Western scientific discourse which occupied an important place in the colonization of India. During the colonial period, science became one of the foundations of Indian modernity and the nation-state. Gradually, the educated Indians sought to locate modern scientific ideas and principles within Indian culture and adopted those for the economic regeneration of the country. The discursive terrain of the history of science, especially in the context of a society with a very long and complex past, is bound to be replete with numerous debates on its nature and evolution, its changing contours, its complex civilizational journey, and finally, the enormous impact it has on our own life and time. The book offers a useful introduction to science, society, and government interface in the Indian context.