The Last Great Plague of Colonial India

The Last Great Plague of Colonial India PDF Author: Natasha Sarkar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198873263
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Plague has attained pandemic proportions on three occasions in recorded history. It is within the context of the third, modern pandemic that this book unfolds: an outbreak which took over twelve million lives in India alone. Natasha Sarkar examines for the first time the full social history of this extraordinary medical crisis in India at the end of the nineteenth century, detailing the nature and progress of the disease within a complex colonial environment. Deep-seated colonial anxieties about governing India influenced and are disclosed in responses to the pandemic. Disease carriers were identified and labelled, and scapegoats stigmatized. Western Imperialism and its developments in biomedicine clashed with older indigenous medical systems. Sarkar also considers attitudes, approaches, and mentalities in indigenous Indian society. She explores what individuals and communities made of the disease, and how social prejudices surrounding it and its sufferers became increasingly heightened in a colonial environment. The plague crisis reveals disparate, heterogeneous voices across communities--the contradictions of a multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural society. The last great plague of Colonial India is thus portrayed in all its political, social, economic, and demographic dimensions.

The Last Great Plague of Colonial India

The Last Great Plague of Colonial India PDF Author: Natasha Sarkar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198873263
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Plague has attained pandemic proportions on three occasions in recorded history. It is within the context of the third, modern pandemic that this book unfolds: an outbreak which took over twelve million lives in India alone. Natasha Sarkar examines for the first time the full social history of this extraordinary medical crisis in India at the end of the nineteenth century, detailing the nature and progress of the disease within a complex colonial environment. Deep-seated colonial anxieties about governing India influenced and are disclosed in responses to the pandemic. Disease carriers were identified and labelled, and scapegoats stigmatized. Western Imperialism and its developments in biomedicine clashed with older indigenous medical systems. Sarkar also considers attitudes, approaches, and mentalities in indigenous Indian society. She explores what individuals and communities made of the disease, and how social prejudices surrounding it and its sufferers became increasingly heightened in a colonial environment. The plague crisis reveals disparate, heterogeneous voices across communities--the contradictions of a multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural society. The last great plague of Colonial India is thus portrayed in all its political, social, economic, and demographic dimensions.

Social History of Epidemics in the Colonial Punjab

Social History of Epidemics in the Colonial Punjab PDF Author: Sasha
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
ISBN: 1482836211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the earliest times, epidemics have broken out at regular intervals killing a large number of people. They have presented peculiar problems both to the state and to the society. The colonial India in general and the Punjab in particular were affected intermittently by epidemics. The Punjab was one of the worst affected provinces of the colonial India in which several lakhs of people fell prey to the deadly epidemics. Punjab was the wheat basket of the British empire and the leading recruitment centre for military service in British Indian army. Due to its strategic and military importance, the British handled the epidemics with great vigour. However, in their attempt to contain the epidemic, the British impinged on the privacy and religious susceptibilites of the natives. The present work discusses the role of the state in handling the epidemics and the response of the society to such measures. Sasha: The author is currently working as an Assistant Professor at Panjab University, Chandigah.She did her doctorate in the faculty of Arts under UGC fellowship from the Panjab University. She has to her credit several publications both in international and national journals on the issues of health, medicine and society in the colonial period.

Room 000

Room 000 PDF Author: Kalpish Ratna
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509803181
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bombay, 1896. A serial killer is on the loose. In Room 000, detectives struggle to snare the culprit, but this murderer is always one step ahead of them. When death is a contagion that spreads from house to house and from street to street, where does one look for clues? As the investigators in Room 000, armed with microscopes and cultures, track the killer, they invent a new science. But the Raj imprisons Bombay in antiquated disciplines that turn the plague into an epic tragedy. Room 000 takes a Holmesian look at the Bombay Plague. In these pages, you'll meet the Argyll Street Irregulars, share the anxieties of the Reluctant Ephemerist, thrill to the discoveries of the Solitary Scientist, and shudder over the repulsive story of the Red Leech. Here too, is Tatya Lakshman, the first Indian detective of the Bombay Police in hot pursuit of the Parsi Plague Current. In their signature style, Kalpish Ratna meld science and adventure into intrigue and mystery. The forgotten truths of the Bombay Plague, seen from this very human perspective, will compel us to look at today's emerging epidemics in an entirely new light.

Empires of Panic

Empires of Panic PDF Author: Robert Peckham
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888208446
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Empires of Panic is the first book to explore how panics have been historically produced, defined, and managed across different colonial, imperial, and post-imperial settings—from early nineteenth-century East Asia to twenty-first-century America. Contributors consider panic in relation to colonial anxieties, rumors, indigenous resistance, and crises, particularly in relation to epidemic disease. How did Western government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities understand, deal with, and neutralize panics? What role did evolving technologies of communication play in the amplification of local panics into global events? Engaging with these questions, the book challenges conventional histories to show how intensifying processes of intelligence gathering did not consolidate empire, but rather served to produce critical uncertainties—the uneven terrain of imperial panic. Robert Peckham is associate professor in the Department of History and co-director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. "Charting the relays of rumor and knowledge that stoke colonial fears of disease, disorder, and disaster, Empires of Panic offers timely and cautionary insight into how viscerally epidemics inflame imperial anxieties, and how words and their communication over new technologies accelerate panic, rally government intervention, and unsettle and entrench the exercise of global power. Relevant a century ago and even more so today." — Nayan Shah, University of Southern California; author ofContagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown "Empires generated anxiety as much as ambition. This fine study focuses on anxieties generated by disease. It is the first book of its kind to track shifting forms of panic through different geopolitical regimes and imperial formations over the course of two centuries. Working across medical and imperial histories, it is a major contribution to both." — Andrew S. Thompson, University of Exeter; author of Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914(with Gary B. Magee)

The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911

The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911 PDF Author: William C. Summers
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030018476X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
When plague broke out in Manchuria in 1910 as a result of transmission from marmots to humans, it struck a region struggling with the introduction of Western medicine, as well as with the interactions of three different national powers: Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. In this fascinating case history, William Summers relates how this plague killed as many as 60,000 people in less than a year, and uses the analysis to examine the actions and interactions of the multinational doctors, politicians, and ordinary residents who responded to it.Summers covers the complex political and economic background of early twentieth-century Manchuria and then moves on to the plague itself, addressing the various contested stories of the plague's origins, development, and ecological ties. Ultimately, Summers shows how, because of Manchuria's importance to the world powers of its day, the plague brought together resources, knowledge, and people in ways that enacted in miniature the triumphs and challenges of transnational medical projects such as the World Health Organization.

The Threat of Pandemic Influenza

The Threat of Pandemic Influenza PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309095042
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Get Book Here

Book Description
Public health officials and organizations around the world remain on high alert because of increasing concerns about the prospect of an influenza pandemic, which many experts believe to be inevitable. Moreover, recent problems with the availability and strain-specificity of vaccine for annual flu epidemics in some countries and the rise of pandemic strains of avian flu in disparate geographic regions have alarmed experts about the world's ability to prevent or contain a human pandemic. The workshop summary, The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready? addresses these urgent concerns. The report describes what steps the United States and other countries have taken thus far to prepare for the next outbreak of "killer flu." It also looks at gaps in readiness, including hospitals' inability to absorb a surge of patients and many nations' incapacity to monitor and detect flu outbreaks. The report points to the need for international agreements to share flu vaccine and antiviral stockpiles to ensure that the 88 percent of nations that cannot manufacture or stockpile these products have access to them. It chronicles the toll of the H5N1 strain of avian flu currently circulating among poultry in many parts of Asia, which now accounts for the culling of millions of birds and the death of at least 50 persons. And it compares the costs of preparations with the costs of illness and death that could arise during an outbreak.

Pandemic India

Pandemic India PDF Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1787388654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Get Book Here

Book Description
Covid-19 has given renewed, urgent attention to ‘the pandemic’ as a devastating, recurrent global phenomenon. Today the term is freely and widely used—but in reality, it has a long and contested history, centred on South Asia. Pandemic India is an innovative enquiry into the emergence of the idea and changing meaning of pandemics, exploring the pivotal role played by—or assigned to—India over the past 200 years. Using the perspectives of the social historian and the historian of medicine, and a wide range of sources, it explains how and why past pandemics were so closely identified with South Asia; the factors behind outbreaks’ exceptional destructiveness in India; responses from society and the state, both during and since the colonial era; and how such collective catastrophes have changed lives and been remembered. Giving a ‘long history’ to India’s current pandemic, the book offers comparisons with earlier epidemics of cholera, plague and influenza. David Arnold assesses the distinctive characteristics and legacies of each episode, tracking the evolution of public health strategies and containment measures. This is a historian’s reflection on time as seen through the pandemic prism, and on the ways the past is used—or misused—to serve the present.

Cultivating the Colonies

Cultivating the Colonies PDF Author: Christina Folke Ax
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0896804798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature revealsthe nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exoticnature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally “got their hands dirty” in the business of empire. The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India. They are global in scope, ranging from the Russian North to Mozambique, examining the consequences of colonialismon nature, including its impact on animals, fisheries, farmlands, medical practices, and even the diets of indigenouspeople. Cultivating the Colonies establishes beyond all possible doubt the importance of the environment as a locus for studyingthe power of the colonial state.

Public Health in British India

Public Health in British India PDF Author: Mark Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
After years of neglect the last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the medical history of India under colonial rule. This is the first major study of public health in British India. It covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes towards India and its inhabitants, and the way in which these were reflected in medical literature and medical policy; the fate of public health at local level under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book places medicine within the context of debates about the government of India, and relations between rulers and ruled. In emphasising the active role of the indigenous population, and in its range of material, it differs significantly from most other work conducted in this subject area.

Epidemics and Ideas

Epidemics and Ideas PDF Author: Terence Ranger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521558310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.