During the nineteenth century, European scientists and physicians considered the tropics the natural home of pathogens. Hot and miasmic, the tropical world was the locus of disease, for Euopeans the great enemy of civilization. In the late nineteenth century when bacteriological laboratories and institutions were introduced to British India, they were therefore as much an imperial mission to cleanse and civilize a tropical colony as a medical one to eradicate disease. Bacteriology offered a panacea in colonial India, a way by which the multifarious political, social, environmental, and medical problems and anxieties, intrinsically linked to its diseases, could have a single resolution. Bacteriology in British India is the first book to provide a social and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating it within the confluence of advances in germ theory, Pastuerian vaccines, colonial medicine, laboratory science, and British imperialism. It recounts the genesis of bacteriology and laboratory medicine in India through a complex history of conflict and alignment between Pasteurism and British imperial medicine. By investigating an array of laboratory notes, medical literature, and literary sources, the volume links colonial medical research with issues of poverty, race, nationalism, and imperial attitudes toward tropical climate and wildlife, contributing to a wide field of scholarship like the history of science and medicine, sociology of science, and cultural history. Pratik Chakrabarti is Chair in History of Science and Medicine, University of Manchester.

Medicine was transformed in the eighteenth century. Aligning the trajectories of intellectual and material wealth, this book uncovers how medicine acquired a new materialism as well as new materials in the context of global commerce and warfare. Bringing together a wide range of sources, this book argues that the intellectual developments in European medicine were inextricably linked to histories of conquest, colonisation and the establishment of colonial institutions. This is the first book to trace the links between colonialism and medicine on such a geographical and conceptual scale. Chakrabarti examines the texts, plants, minerals, colonial hospitals, dispensatories and the works of surgeons, missionaries and travellers to demonstrate that these were shaped by the material constitution of eighteenth century European colonialism. This book will appeal to experts and students in histories of medicine, science, and imperialism as well as south Asian and Caribbean history. -- .

Medicine was transformed in the eighteenth century. Aligning the trajectories of intellectual and material wealth, this book uncovers how medicine acquired a new materialism as well as new materials in the context of global commerce and warfare. Bringing together a wide range of sources, this book argues that the intellectual developments in European medicine were inextricably linked to histories of conquest, colonization and the establishment of colonial institutions. This is the first book to trace the links between colonialism and medicine on such a geographical and conceptual scale. Chakrabarti examines the texts, plants, minerals, colonial hospitals, dispensatories and the works of surgeons, missionaries and travellers to demonstrate that these were shaped by the material constitution of eighteenth century European colonialism. This book will appeal to experts and students in histories of medicine, science, and imperialism as well as south Asian and Caribbean history. -- .

The first book to provide a social and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating it at the confluence of colonial medical practices, institutionalization, and social movements. During the nineteenth century, European scientists and physicians considered the tropics the natural home of pathogens. Hot and miasmic, the tropical world was the locus of disease, for Euopeans the great enemy of civilization. Inthe late nineteenth century when bacteriological laboratories and institutions were introduced to British India, they were therefore as much an imperial mission to cleanse and civilize a tropical colony as a medical one to eradicate disease. Bacteriology offered a panacea in colonial India, a way by which the multifarious political, social, environmental, and medical problems and anxieties, intrinsically linked to its diseases, could have a single resolution. Bacteriology in British India is the first book to provide a social and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating it within the confluence of advances in germ theory, Pastuerian vaccines, colonial medicine, laboratory science, and British imperialism. It recounts the genesis of bacteriology and laboratory medicine in India through a complex history of conflict and alignment between Pasteurism and British imperial medicine. By investigating an array of laboratory notes, medical literature, and literary sources, the volume links colonial medical research with issues of poverty, race, nationalism, and imperial attitudes toward tropical climate andwildlife, contributing to a wide field of scholarship like the history of science and medicine, sociology of science, and cultural history. Pratik Chakrabarti is Chair in History of Science and Medicine, University of Manchester.

Learn how the deep history of nature became a dominant paradigm of historical thinking, through a study of landscapes of India. Winner of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging-often for sewage, transport, or minerals-revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants-past, present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality. Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.

The history of modern medicine is inseparable from the history of imperialism. Medicine and Empire provides an introduction to this shared history - spanning three centuries and covering British, French and Spanish imperial histories in Africa, Asia and America. Exploring the major developments in European medicine from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Pratik Chakrabarti shows that the major developments in European medicine had a colonial counterpart and were closely intertwined with European activities overseas: * the increasing influence of natural history on medicine * the growth of European drug markets * the rise of surgeons in status * ideas of race and racism * advancements in sanitation and public health * the expansion of the modern quarantine system * the emergence of Germ theory and global vaccination campaigns. Drawing on recent scholarship and primary texts, this book narrates a mutually constitutive history in which medicine was both a 'tool' and a product of imperialism, and provides an original, accessible insight into the deep historical roots of the problems that plague global health today.