Doctors of Plural Medicine, Knowledge Transmission, and Family Space in India

ABSTRACT

The transmission of traditional medical knowledge – either institutionally or through established lineages – is assumed to involve one single tradition or another. In India however, families of doctors often engage with multiple traditions, including Ayurveda, Unani, homeopathy, yoga, and biomedicine. Parents, children, siblings and spouses trained in different medical systems occasionally share knowledge and clinical space, producing versatile therapies. By exploring such cases, I challenge studies focused on single traditions and propose to examine “family space” as the physical and relational proximity that enables kin doctors to experiment with plural therapies while negotiating legitimacy and authority within the changing institution of the Indian family.

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KEYWORDS:

• North India
• Ayurveda
• family
• lineage
• medical pluralism
• traditional medical knowledge

Acknowledgments

Without the kindness of doctors, their families, and visitors to their clinics who took time to speak with me and patiently answered my questions this article would not have been possible. I thank them profusely. I am grateful to Joseph Alter, Carol Chan and Senem Guler-Biyikli for a thoughtful balance of encouragement and critical reading that pushed my ideas forward. I thank the Medical Anthropology editor Lenore Manderson and the anonymous reviewers for their time, careful reading of this article, and challenging questions. I also thank Bharat Venkat, Nayantara Appleton, and an anonymous reviewer from the Science and Medicine in South Asia (SMSA) group of the Society for Medical Anthropology to which an early draft of this article was submitted. This study was exempt from review by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Pittsburgh.

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Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms.

2. Historical cases from nineteenth century Bengal suggest that there were some “mongrel homoeopaths,” i.e. allopathic doctors who secretly prescribed homeopathic drugs and used them in the time of epidemics (Arnold and Sarkar 2002:44).

Additional information

Funding

This study received generous support from The Wenner-Gren Foundation [Grant No: 9093] and summer grants for preliminary research from the Department of Anthropology, the University Center for International Studies, and the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

Notes on contributors

Venera R. Khalikova

Venera R. Khalikova is lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and research associate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of medical plurality, identity, nationalism, healthy food, and consumption in India.