Poonam Bala (ed.), Medicine and Colonialism: Historical Perspectives in India and South Africa (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), pp. 225, £60.00, hardback, ISBN: 9781848934658.

Abstract

This collection of essays contributes significantly to our understanding of the process of colonialism in India and South Africa. Though not meant to be a comparative study, parallels of immense importance can be drawn in the context of medical intervention by the colonialists into the indigenous societies and the kind of interaction and engagement that followed. From the quite recent occurrence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa, the collection moves back and forth in time and has a wide range of coverage both temporally and geographically. The first two essays by Poonam Bala and Steve Phatlane, though set in two different time frames, deal with the engagement of indigenous medical systems and biomedicine and how the former held its sway in the face of the latter's onslaught for the large part of the indigenous population. It is interesting to note how Phatlane, in discussing a recent disease phenomenon like HIV, has looked back on the colonial experience in assessing the role of indigenous medical practitioners in the context of sexually transmitted disease. The third essay, by Russel Viljoen, is a very interesting one which deals in detail with how the indigenous medical tradition of the Khoikhoi in Cape of Good Hope responded to the coming of the European traders, Indian slaves and colonial doctors. The author shows how, on the one hand, the coming of Europeans exposed the colonies to the onslaught of a number of diseases, and, on the other, 'transformed the perceptions of [the] colonised population on issues regarding public health' (p. 46). The politicisation of disease and sanitation in the context of the smallpox epidemic not only changed the medical discourse of the colony but also destabilised its social and political structure. In this context the author discusses how the coming of the colonial doctors exposed the 'black body' to a 'gaze' which marked the beginning of anthropological justification of the racial superiority of the colonisers. For the Khoikhoi, Western medicine remained alien and bewitching and most of the indigenous population depended on the native doctors for their treatment, continuing their age-old traditions. The next chapter, by Samiparna Samanta, marks a thematic shift by discussing the importance of epizootics in shaping the colonial discourse on veterinary science, public health, nutrition and bhadralok anxieties in colonial Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the context of meat-eating habits, the author has shown how rinderpest emerged as a 'site of contestation' and diverse tension. The next three chapters deal with the issue of plague, which has already garnered a lot of academic attention. But here plague is analysed from a different perspective. Howard Phillips discusses a hitherto less explored side of the Mahatma during the Black Plague in Johannesburg. With a brilliant narrative of the events leading to Gandhi's awareness of pneumonic plague and his emergence as a leader in Johannesburg, Phillips critically revises his sources in explo...