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.

Focusing on India and South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the essays in this collection address power and enforced modernity as applied to medicine. Clashes between traditional methods of healing and the practices brought in by colonizers are explored across both territories. Chapters address issues of education, public health, autonomy and the transfer of knowledge, using case studies on birth-control, plague, human-animal diseases, AIDS, the legal system and the treatment of the mentally ill to compare and contrast these ex-British colonies.

Poonam Bala s Contesting Colonial Authority explores the interplay of conformity and defiance amongst the plural medical tradition in colonial India. The contributors reveal how Indian elites, nationalists, and the rest of the Indian population participated in the move to revisit and frame a new social character of Indian Medicine. Viewed in the light of the cultural, nationalistic, social, literary and scientific essentials, Contesting Colonial Authority highlights various indigenous interpretations and mechanisms through which Indian sciences and medicine were projected against the cultural background of a rich medical tradition.

A medical sociologist with a historian's obsession with detail and documentation, Poonam Bala tenaciously follows the developmental trajectory of medical pluralism in India with a keen eye to the dynamic social production of health and healing systems as social systems, practices, and technologies of power. Covering a broad swathe of history, this book explores how a turbulently emerging Indian State with shifting alliances and evolving rules ideologies (with the accompanying emergence of class and caste identities and opportunities) gave rise to a particular growth of scientific and, specifically, medical traditions in India. As a set of healing practices, a literary art, and a cultural knowledge base, India's medical traditions represent 'an acculturated product' of competing ideologies and the expression of contested State, and social and religious policies over time. Bala focuses on the power of State intervention and multiple levels of patronage to shape medical practice and theory, and in turn, India's very history.

Focusing on India and South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the essays in this collection address power and enforced modernity as applied to medicine. Clashes between traditional methods of healing and the practices brought in by colonizers are explored across both territories.

While literature on medicine and colonialism has increased rapidly in the past nearly two decades, this volume presents yet another way of looking at ideas of medicine, health, and disease. It portrays the role played by power in various ways in which biomedicine became a site of contested ventures_a site which saw an interplay of medicine, ruling ideologies, and resistance by indigenous populations. Ideas of disease and health range from control of infectious diseases and epidemics, medications and indigenous therapeutics, clinical medicine and surgery, to reproductive health, with the added dimension of medical pluralism and elites as enabling these interactions and processes. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students of history, sociology, anthropology, medicine, and public health. With essays on different regions around the world, it will serve as a guide to scholars and students in colonial studies, history of medicine, and world history.