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Article ID: CBB000773195

Beyond East and West. From the History of Colonial Medicine to a Social History of Medicine(s) in South Asia (2007)

Social History of Medicine
Volume: 20
Pages: 505--524

Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Part of a series of essays on “Twenty Years of Social History of Medicine”
Language: English

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Medicine History of medicine, as a discipline Colonialism India, civilization and culture Asia India Pakistan Sri Lanka Nepal Bangladesh Bhutan

This article reflects on theories and methodologies that have characterised the field of the history of colonial medicine over the last couple of decades. It discusses the merits and flaws of hitherto predominant conceptual paradigms that concerned themselves mainly with issues of power, governmentality, the status of modernity and the `condition' of the colonisers and the colonised. The recent shift in research focus from western or colonial medicine to the multiplicity of indigenous medicines is assessed as a potentially more nuanced, balanced and adequately theory-focused as well as evidence-driven approach. It is argued that the seemingly irreconcilable tension and at times unhelpful hostility between proponents of Fanonian and Foucaultian paradigms on the one hand and archival data-focused historians of medicine on the other needs to be overcome lest researchers continue to be caught up in either ideologically fraught and conceptually misleading east versus west bifurcations or narrowly framed local case studies. Rather than discerning the end of social history of medicine research on south Asia, the author suggests that there is much scope and indeed urgent need for a social history of medicines in south Asia that is guided by crisp theory and at the same time anchored in the richly textured fabric of a wide range of economic, political, cultural and socio-historical sources.

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Article Dolan, Brian (2007) Twenty Years of Social History of Medicine. Social History of Medicine (p. 435). unapi

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