Locating the Medical

Abstract

This volume interrogates the foundational categories that have come to define medical science in modern South Asia. Through case studies ranging from nineteenth- to twenty first-centuries, it addresses the following questions: How and in what conditions does an event, a substance, an actor, an institution or a particular situation of the body-mind become or cease to be considered ‘medical’ and according to whom? How did contingent political histories engender the medical? How does the medical, in turn, reshape and sustain political categories? Is the medical necessarily a stable, coherent and continuous category? In what ways are the rigid boundaries between the medical and the nonmedical blurred? In so doing, Locating the Medical examines close interactions between political authorities, corporeal knowledge and objects of governance. This volume showcases various trends in the historiography of medicine in South Asia. It reasserts the material and metaphorical significance of the medical in shaping the histories of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. At the same time, these histories reveal various ways in which the medical, both as a category and a set of processes, was consolidated and domesticated. The approaches adopted here should be relevant to similar efforts to analyse various core discipline-defining concepts prevalent in other fields.