Nationalizing the Body
The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine
By (author) Projit Bihari Mukharji
Publication date:
01 February 2009Publisher
Anthem PressDimensions:
229x153mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781843313151
This book seeks to move emphasis away from the over-riding importance given to the state in existing studies of ‘western’ medicine in India, and locates medical practice within its cultural, social and professional milieus. Based on Bengali doctors writings this book examines how various medical problems, challenges and debates were understood and interpreted within overlapping contexts of social identities and politics on the one hand, and their function within a largely unregulated medical market on the other.
‘Projit Mukharji presents a meticulously researched construction of the identity of “Daktari” physicians, or Indian practitioners of Western medicine, through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in British Colonial Bengal. […] A significant and definitive contribution to this field.' —Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Harvard University, in ‘Social History of Medicine’