Learning institutions in South Asian medicine.

Abstract

The development of European medicine in nineteenth-century ‘India’ gradually led to the exclusion of local therapies from medical educational institutions. For centuries, the colonizers showed interest in local plants and the knowledge of local therapists (often for their own ends), but the rise of scientific skepticism shaped the direction of institutionalized Ayurveda and Unani, the two major learned medicines on the Indian subcontinent. The famous Native Medical Institution of Calcutta, for instance, where medical staff received lessons in both ‘scientific medicine’ and vernacular therapies, was closed shortly after it was founded in 1822. From 1835 onwards, the creation of diverse schools of medicine did not pursue this type of pluralistic approach (Pati et al. 2001, pp. 7–8) and the institutions of learning in colonial India began to be refashioned. The hostility of the colonial policies toward Indian medicines and the growing influence of nationalist discourse in the preand post-independence periods prompted traditional therapists to mobilize. They formed associations and spread their knowledge, thanks to the new printing methods. Specialized colleges of