Debating Scientific Medicine: Homoeopathy and Allopathy in Late Nineteenth-Century Medical Print in Bengal (2012)
The historiography of medicine in South Asia often assumes the presence of preordained, homogenous, coherent and clearly-bound medical systems. They also tend to take the existence of a medical `mainstream' for granted. This article argues that the idea of an `orthodox', `mainstream' named allopathy and one of its `alternatives' homoeopathy were co-produced in Bengal. It emphasises the role of the supposed `fringe', ie. homoeopathy, in identifying and organising the `orthodoxy' of the time. The shared market for medicine and print provided a crucial platform where such binary identities such as `homoeopaths' and `allopaths' were constituted and reinforced. This article focuses on a range of polemical writings by physicians in the Bengali print market since the 1860s. Published mostly in late nineteenth-century popular medical journals, these concerned the nature, definition and scope of `scientific' medicine. The article highlights these published disputes and critical correspondence among physicians as instrumental in simultaneously shaping the categories `allopathy' and `homoeopathy' in Bengali print. It unravels how contemporary understandings of race, culture and nationalism informed these medical discussions. It further explores the status of these medical contestations, often self-consciously termed `debates', as an essential contemporary trope in discussing `science' in the vernacular.
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