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JOURNAL OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY VOLUME LXII No. 4 2020 Special Issue on History of Diseases and Medicine in India and Beyond THE ASIATIC SOCIETY 1 PARK STREET KOLKATA 16 © The Asiatic Society ISSN 0368-3308 Edited and published by Dr. Satyabrata Chakrabarti General Secretary The Asiatic Society 1 Park Street Kolkata 700 016 Published in January 2021 Printed at Desktop Printers 3A, Garstin Place, 4th Floor Kolkata 700 001 Price : 400 (Complete vol. of four nos.) CONTENTS Introduction to the volume ... ... v ARTICLES Social Perceptions of Diseases in Early India Nayana Sharma Mukherjee ... ... 1 Prameha: Conception of a Disease in Ancient Äyurvedic Texts Nupur Dasgupta ... ... 17 An Illustrated Ophthalmic Register of an Arogyasala in Serfoji II’s (1798-1832) Thanjavur : An Emblem of Plural Medical Practices Tutul Chakravarti and Ranabir Chakravarti ... 49 Environmental Change, Health and Disease in Bengal’s Western Frontier : Chotanagpur between 1800-1950s Sanjukta Das Gupta ... ... 67 Pollution, Public Health and the People of Calcutta: The Nineteenth Century Mahua Sarkar ... ... 85 “The Child to Avoid Fire; by Allowing it to Burn Itself”: Public Health and Tuberculosis in South India, 1898-1947 B. Eswara Rao ... ... 121 Smallpox and Children in Colonial Bengal : Revisiting a Virulent Epidemic Sujata Mukherjee and Nilanjana Basu ... 147 Science and Philanthropy in a Colonial State : Reviewing the Intervention of Rockefeller Foundation in Bengal Arabinda Samanta ... ... 163 ( iv ) Trauma of Tuberculosis : Medical Intervention, Containment and Popular Response in Post-independence India Achintya Kumar Dutta ... ... 179 Government Policies and Medical Treatment in three Ayurvedic Hospitals in Kolkata (1970-2010) Sutapa Saha Mitra ... ... 205 Medical History : British India, the Dutch Indies and Beyond Deepak Kumar ... ... 229 GLEANINGS FROM THE PAST The Design of a Treatise on the Plants of India Sir William Jones ... ... 247 NOTES ON GLEANINGS William Jones, “The Design of a Treatise on the Plants of India”, Asiatick Researches: or, Transactions of the Society, Volume the Second, Calcutta, 1790, 345-352 Nupur Dasgupta ... ... 255 BOOK REVIEW Shinjini Das, Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India : Family, Market and Homoeopathy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. xiv + 292, Hardcover $ 33.85. Apalak Das ... ... 261 Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N. A. Attewell, Locating The Medical: Explorations in South Asian History, New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2018. pp. vi + 307. 950 ISBN - 13: 978-0-19-948671-7. Trisha Halder ... ... 267 Introduction to the volume History of Medicine is a sub-discipline and research area that has been growing in different shapes and contours for the last few centuries. The orientation to history of medicine in India emerged ever since the nineteenth century. The exercise was undertaken by two groups of colonial scholars. The first group essentially comprised Indologists who retrieved manuscripts and had begun to look into and read Sanskrit and Persian texts on medicine. They often reviewed Indian works on medicine as cultural texts in the light of modern western episteme.1 A number of Indian scholars were also involved in retrieving classical texts on medicine from the 1870s and a few of them turned to writing a history of medicine on the lines set down by pioneering scholars like H.H. Wilson.2 The third group of scholars were practicing physicians serving the colonial institutions. Many of them tumbled upon Indian practices related to health, especially Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha systems and responded to these in terms of their professional interest, which often went beyond the immediate and practical to the academic.3 But a large number of practicing physicians had entered into the portals of history of medicine through their commissioned works. They left official and personal reports on their service conditions or on diseases encountered. The body of official and public records related to medical practices grew with the institutionalization of medical service. Some of these were officially commissioned reports on epidemic diseases like malaria4, cholera5, small pox6 etc., which have now become the source books for present day historians. The modern day episteme and concept of social history of medicine had to wait for the late 20th century to take off. A group of scholars edited collections of essays on Asian and Indian medicine towards the ( vi ) end of the 1970s and in the 80’s.7 Another major attempt was made under the direction of D. P. Chattopadhyaya from the Centre for Studies in Civilizations, where essays on histories of science, technology and medicine along with philosophy were made into a series of volumes.8 O. P. Jaggi took the initiative to write on the ancient chapter of medicine in India and his encompassing work was published in 1981.9 However, the first batch of historians who wrote critical stand - alone works on the social history of medicine in India included Poonam Bala10, David Arnold11, Mark Harrison12, Deepak Kumar13 and Anil Kumar14, among others. Their works got published through the decade of the 1990s and set the trend of new research. We are indebted to them. But still the history of medicine remained bound for some time within a critique of colonial interventions and evaluation of indigenous engagements. There has been attempts to focus on policy making, especially highlighting public health, processes of institutionalization of health service and medical education. It is only very recently that a kind of hesitant step is being ventured towards understanding the issue of health in general, both as a social phenomenon with an open approach to diseases and medicine as a social concern as well as a service based applied knowledge. Many of the stalwarts, with whom the journey of the modern chapter of history of medicine had been initiated later contributed more to these understandings and were joined by a new batch of historians who added fresh perspectives and themes in the first two decades of the 21st century. It is needless to say that a social history approach to health and medicine opens the gate to multitudes of perspectives. Medicine thus is observed in these lenses as a trajectory of social history with a wider canvas where the thrust on hybrid knowledge and plural medicine add immensely to the more formal and older traditions of doing the history of medicine. The recent trend toward a cultural history of medicine is opening the doors to new conception of the sites and themes of research, no longer bound within the earlier defining parameters. A floodgate opened with Michel Foucault’s path breaking works bringing in a radical conception of power, highlighting ( vii ) the social and ideological stakes playing in the field of institutionalized medical services. The turn took more towards semiotics of social relations and ultimately towards a cultural turn in the history of medicine.15 It is not only medicine as a practice and knowledge that is important now but health and remedies perceived from a broader purview of history assumes more importance within chosen specificities of enquiry. Medical engagements have transcended the boundaries of nations since time immemorial and had spread throughout the globe even before the era of “discovery” of the east by the west. Concerns for health and medical culture therefore cannot be observed in isolated contexts as such engagements could not have been bred in isolation. The present world of medicine is moored to global interventions, not only for regulatory and consequent legitimation and commercial processes, but also as the globe comes closer in organizational role in mitigating major health disasters, amply evident in the current times of global crisis we are faced with now. This needs to be understood from multiple operational dynamics. Finances, funding, philanthropic contributions, state interventions, institutional processes bring together aspects of the public and private worlds of medicine and health. Moreover, the global scope of the social history of medicine also assumes more significance as we increasingly encounter the reality of how the multiple strands of what we know as alternative or even hybrid health practices tend to play more important part in present socio-economic contexts, having been transformed into the spectrum of capitalized services and products. It devolves upon the historian to track this discursive trajectory of history of medicine from a social perspective where the health related practices assume other significances and require new kinds of “explanatory affects”, to borrow the idea from Hayden White.16 Medicine is reviewed as a site of practices, practice – based knowledge in its social scope and this becomes more important as we travel back from the modern to the pre modern contexts. At the same time, it is imperative that we explore and situate these histories in wider contexts ( viii ) even if to get a sense of the ubiquity of health concerns and associated frames of knowledge and systems of control which overlay any engagement between society and health care facilities. These are basically some of the aspects that have assumed importance in the circuit of historians. The present seminar was basically intended to bring about a group of scholars who would especially focus on the primary aspect of medicine especially focusing on concepts of diseases, state and non-state institutional approaches to treatment and social impact of diseases. The Asiatic Society, which has heralded the study of medicine from historical as well as scientific perspectives in the scholarly circuit was the ideal institution to host the Two-Day seminar on Health, Diseases and Society: History of Medicine in India and Beyond in February, 2019. We, the conveners of the seminar, are thankful that The Asiatic Society decided to bring out the proceedings of the seminar as a special issue of the journal. Varied themes were addressed by various contributors at the seminar. The session covered the development of engagements with health and medicine through different phases of Indian history, early to pre modern, colonial to contemporary.