Colonial Medicine (book review)
© Joseph Sramek
Among many historians of colonial India - or for that matter the other colonies - Western medicine is often seen as one of the more effective means of imperial conquest. Yet these interpretations of medicine as "tools of empire" - Arnold argues - fail to adequately explain what really happened during the near two centuries of British rule in India. [1] Instead of being a conquest, the century and a half attempt by Western medicine to infiltrate and vanquish indigenous medicine was, for the most part, an abominable failure. How and why these "civilizing" efforts failed, and the various natures of Indian responses to them, form the core of this book. In his analysis, Arnold examines three epidemic diseases - smallpox, cholera, and the bubonic plague - and describes the varied initiatives taken by the British authorities and the varied responses given by Indian subjects during the course of the nineteenth century.
In the first, Arnold chronicles the protracted attempt by the British authorities to vaccinate Indians against smallpox and the equally determined resistance by the Indian subjects to these measures. Among the various inhibitors to British success were the religious beliefs of Indians. For many Indians, smallpox was not considered a medical disease treatable by vaccine, but rather as a religious one, even survived only through divine intervention. [2] While many Indians began to inoculate their children during the nineteenth century through the practice of variolation - the process of injecting a significantly weakened, yet live, smallpox virus coming from the previous year's outbreak - they continued to resist vaccination for several reasons. For one thing, while variolation still respected Sitala - the Hindu goddess of smallpox and disease - and her "rights over the body," vaccination expressly "violated" these "rights." [3] Secondly, as vaccination was arm-to-arm, it gave no consideration to Hindu notions of "pollution" through bodily contact between persons of different castes. Thus, vaccination, instead of being seen as a public service committed by the "benevolent" British authorities, was viewed as a "mark of subjection to the British Government." [4]
This great distrust and hostility between colonizer and colonized is seen even more in British and Indian responses to cholera. Whereas many Indians viewed cholera outbreaks as divine punishment for not actively resisting British attacks on their religion, their British counterparts saw it as a political disease, threatening the very foundations of British power and authority in India [5] Yet this antagonism and distrust did not lead to a protracted culture conflict, as might be expected, but rather to a sort of detente.
