Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal

179 Pages·2017·8.914 MB·English

by  Arabinda Samanta

LIVING WITH EPIDEMICS IN
COLONIAL BENGAL

LIVING WITH EPIDEMICS IN
COLONIAL BENGAL
1818–1945
ARABINDA SAMANTA
Firstpublished2018
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To
Professor Deepak Kumar

Contents
Preface 9
Introduction 13
1. Malaria 24
2. Cholera 54
3. Smallpox 77
4. Plague 109
5. Conclusion 145
Bibliography 153
Index 179

Preface
This volume is a revised and updated version of my post-doctoral
work on popular perceptions of disease and medicine. It engages
with multiple epidemics that gripped the Indian subcontinent
through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The spatial
location is, however, colonial Bengal, though for obvious reason the
focus shifts to other region of this subcontinent as well. The project
was funded by the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine,
University College, London, as also by the Zakir Husain Centre for
Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. A
research grant from Rockefeller Foundation enabled me to consult
documents housed in the Rockefeller Archive Center, New York.
Much of what I argue in this book has been presented at various
national and international seminars/conferences during the last
decade, and it is only after adequately addressing my fellow colleagues’
informed criticism, and sustained by their constant prodding, that I
ventured to put them in this present form.
The major arguments in the chapter on Plague were presented at the
International Conference on ‘Hybrids and Partnerships: Comparing
the Histories of Indigenous Medicine in Southern Africa and South
Asia’, organized jointly by Manchester University and the Wellcome
Trust for the History of Medicine at Oxford, held at Oxford on 15-
16 September 2005. The paper drew interested attention of Professor
Mark Harrison, and I am extremely grateful to him for his valuable
comments on the earlier draft of the paper. Part of this presentation
was published in Ranjan Chakrabarti, ed., Situating Environmental
History (2007) and a different version of it was included in Arun
Bandopadhyay, ed., Science and Society in India, 1750-2000 (2010).