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ABSTRACT
Colonial medical education and public health policies emerged from an intriguing discourse of negotiation between the government and the people. These ‘structured conflicts’, rooted in the politics and the debates of the colonial institutions not only provided opportunities for creative thinking about public health but also for imposing constraints. The colonial and post-colonial India medical legislative debates revealing a new language of protest, assumed greater significance with the growing nationalist movement and the general (though variegated) intellectual polarisation – western and indigenous systems of medicine. Problematising the historiographic assertion of medical modernisation in colonial India to be a part of ‘civilising mission’, this paper argues that legislature emerged as a platform of activism and protest against the colonial and post-colonial State’s appropriation of modernity. While some members appealed for extending the benefit of ‘modern’ western medicine to the general Indian population, some debated in favour of introducing the indigenous medical systems to the terms of modern professionalisation. The post-colonial policies reveal the true significance of the legislative debates in reviving the position of indigenous systems of medicine in the context of professional modernity.
Acknowledgements
My sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their enriching comments.
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I confirm that there is no conflict of financial or non-financial interest in the content of this article.
Notes
1 Bombay Medical Registration Act, 1912, Tamil Nadu Medical Registration Act, 1914, Bengal Medical Act, 1914, Punjab Medical Registration Act, 1916. According to these Acts, Councils were formed in the respective provinces which were needed to maintain a Register for the registration of the duly qualified medical practitioners (as were given in the schedule). But the problem was that according to these Acts, the Councils were given the power to sanction registration to persons on satisfaction that they possessed ‘the knowledge and skill requisite for the efficient practice of medicine’.
2 Indian Medical Review, 1936, p. 92.
3 Home Department, Medical Branch, Proceedings No. 51–57, Part A, April, 1917. Such authorization was given to the National Medical College, Calcutta, and later Boards were created in Bihar and Orissa and Burma for the purpose.
4 Ibid., p. 112.
5 Home Department, Medical Branch, Part B, 207–217, May, 1916.
6 Debates of Imperial Legislative Assembly, March 9, 1916, p. 293.
7 Ibid., p. 297.
8 The Indian Legislative Council, Vol. 57, March 6–10, 1919, p. 729.
9 Ibid., p. 94
10 Indian Medical Review, 1936, p. 92.
11 Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of Governor General in India, March 7, 1917, p. 559.
12 LAD, March 21, 1921, p. 1410.
13 Proceedings of the Indian Legislative Council, March 10, 1919, p. 811.
14 General Medical Council and Indian Qualifications: Suggestions to the Government, TOI, August 2, 1929, p. 4.
15 LAD, September 28, 1921, p. 1167.
16 Indian Medical Degrees: The General Medical Council and Indian Qualifications, History of a Ten – Year Controversy, BMJ, Vol.1, No. 3610, March 15, 1930, pp. 508–511.
17 LAD, February 9, 1922, p. 2286.
18 Ibid., p. 2288.
19 Ibid., p.2292.
20 LAD, February 13, 1933, pp. 554–555.
21 The local governments had possessed such power before the Act of 1916 was passed. But the Act of 1916 had rendered this provision of the local Acts to be nugatory as it had prevented and penalized the holding out of any degrees by medical men which had not been granted by certain specific institutions.
22 LAD, February 4, 1926, p. 834.
23 Indian Medical Review, 1936, p. 165.
24 The Future of Medicine in India, BMJ, November 22, 1924, p. 966.
25 Home Department, Medical Branch, Proceedings No. 4, Part A, September, 1915.
26 Debates in the Council of States, February 16, 1921, p. 110.
27 For a Detailed analysis of indigenous, see, Shinjini Das, Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, Market and Homoeopathy, Cambridge University Press, 2019. Also, Madhuri Sharma, Indigenous and Western Medicine in Colonial India, Cambridge University Press, Citation2011 and Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India, Orient Blackswan, Citation2007 for the professional tension and anxieties within the indigenous system in their response to the western medicine and medical professionals.
28 Ibid.
29 Bogus Medical Degrees: Appeal dismissed the Medical Council’s Ban, TOI, November 20, 1924, p. 8.
30 Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor General of India, February 15, 1916, p. 117.
31 Debates in the Council of States, February 16, 1921, p. 110.
32 Ibid., p. 295.
33 Home Department, Medical Branch, Part B, 207–217, May 1916.
34 Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of Governor General of India, February 6, 1918, p. 457.
35 LAD, March 1, 1919, Appendix B, pp. 422–423.
36 Indigenous Systems of Medicine in India, BMJ, September 15, 1923, p. 479.
37 Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of Governor General of India, February 6, 1918, p. 457.
38 LAD, March 10, 1920, pp. 1271–1276.
39 LAD, March 11, 1921, p. 977.
40 LAD, March 11, 1921, p. 976.
41 Rau was a member the Council of States, nominated from Madras. He was a medical practitioner and one of the co-founders of All India Medical Association. He was also the co-founder of a medical journal named Antiseptic.
42 LAD, March 2, 1926, p. 345.
43 LAD, February 3, 1923, p. 1877.
44 Ibid., p. 1879.
45 Ibid., p. 60.
46 Ibid., p. 78.