Nationalizing the Body

"[Book title] revisits the history of 'western' medicine in colonial South Asia through the lives, writings and practice of the numerous Bengali daktars who adopted and practised it. Refusing to see 'western' medicine as an alienated appendage of the colonial state, this book explores how 'western' medicine was vernacularised. It argues that a burgeoning medical market and a medical publishing industry together gave daktari medicine a social identity which did not solely derive from its association with the state. Accessing many of the best-known ideas and episodes of colonial South Asian medical history, it seeks to understand how daktari medicine re-positioned the colonized bodies as nationalized bodies."--Back cover.