Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India

Abstract

Bureaucracy, Print-Market and Family Firms'It is now an acknowledged fact that the number of homoeopaths, either good, bad or indifferent is a legion in India and there has been a network of homoeopathic pharmacies . . . all over our country . . . Harmony [between them] should be the basic principle upon which true friendship and good business can last and flourish.' 1 'All householders are businessmen in a sense. But in general, by businessmen one understands the traders.' 2 'To a businessman, honest, dutiful and efficient employee [sic] is more precious than the son. Many entrepreneurs trust such employees more than their own son.' 3In August 1882, the Indian Medical Gazette published a lengthy editorial article titled 'Medical Practice in Calcutta'. 4 The article contemplated the status of western state medicine in the city as well as the main hindrances to its wider dissemination. The Indian Medical Gazette, an unofficial mouthpiece of the Indian Medical Service, mostly comprised of contributors variously involved in the colonial state's public health endeavours. Its editorial, penned by the influential Kenneth Macleod, Professor of Surgery at the Calcutta Medical College and the Chairman of the Calcutta Health Society, was in many ways voicing the anxieties of the imperial state and its medical bureaucracy. Macleod particularly raised an alarm about the messy nature of the medical market in Calcutta that allowed for an extensive sphere of unregulated practices to flourish. The article brought to life a world of medical relief sharply polarised