Biomedicine as a Contested Site

Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts

Edited by Poonam Bala

Publication date:

26 September 2008

Length of book:

196 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

241x161mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739124604

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.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Contested Ventures: Biomedicine in Colonial Contexts
Chapter 2 1. Colonizing Mother Egypt, Domesticating Egyptian Mothers
Chapter 3 2. "Defying" Medical Autonomy: Indigenous Elites and Medicine in Colonial India
Chapter 4 3. Medical Knowledge and Professional Power: From the Luso-Brazilian Context to Imperial Brazil
Chapter 5 4. The Invincible Generals: Disease and the Fight for Empire in Cuba, 1868 to 1898
Chapter 6 5. The White Man in the Bedroom: Contraception and Resistance on Commercial Farms in Colonial Rhodesia
Chapter 7 6. Translations and Transformations: Toward Creating New Men in Early Twentieth-Century China
Chapter 8 7. Rejected or Elected? Processes of Therapeutic Selection and Colonial Medicines in French Vietnam, 1905-39
Chapter 9 8. Articulating Medical Ideas: Medicine and Medical Education in New Spain
Chapter 10 9. Disease, Doctors, and De beers Capitalists: Smallpox and Scandal in Colonial South Africa during the Mineral Revolution and British Imperialism, c. 1882-1883
Chapter 11 10. Submitting to Surgery in the 1890s: Four Vignettes

Biomedicine as a Contested Site shows us the dialectics of power and knowledge in colonial societies of the past. Not only social historians will benefit from the insights provided by this book because its theme is highly relevant for understanding of contemporary medical pluralism in which biomedicine coexists with Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Just as in the past when indigenous medicines had to deal with the structural dominance of western medicine, the CAM practitioners of today walk a fine line between competition, accommodation, and resistance.