AHA Session 305
Society for Advancing the History of South Asia 7
Sunday, January 7, 2024: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Franciscan B (Hilton Union Square, Ballroom)
Chair:
Karim Malak, Wagner College
Session Abstract
This session explores the global history of medicine in far flung territories, colonies and locales and their intersection with burgeoning global regimes of empire, law, medical knowledge and mobility from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Though recent global histories of medicine and hygiene locate the global within the imperial (Bashford, 2003), this panel offers a different perspective. Utilizing multiple methodologies from intellectual histories of race-science, to histories of medical texts, international sanitary regulations and disease, it focuses on historical case studies from the Global South to highlight cases of resistance to imperial notions of medicine. Instead of the focus on medicine as a colonial way of policing bodies that causes metropolitan anxieties in the incidence of disease (Tagliacazzo, 2016), one where bodies of knowledge are deployed from the metropole by Western scientists, this panel looks at medicine as a contested site whose boundaries and meaning with the political was being re-shaped around the world. By looking at connections (Conrad 2016) between the Ottoman Empire and France, India and international legal regimes instituted by the League of Nations, and African and British physicians, it offers a global history of medicine as a field of experimentation and resistance in the Global South. Relying on recent studies that show how medicine outside of Europe was adopted in the early nineteenth century as a site of resistance (Afkhami 1999), this panel looks at Iraqi, Sierra Leonean, Indian intellectuals and doctors to demonstrate that medicine was being retooled in the Global South.
The first paper looks at the bodily conceptualization of disease and political imagination in the eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley as a connected and multi-nodal contact zone of Hindustan. It focuses on discourses of illness and rulership in Assamese, Tai-Ahom and Burmese texts and their use in the royal courts, offering a glimpse into the early modern world of medicine and political imagination before the arrival of colonial and imperial medicine in South and Southeast Asia. Shifting to the nineteenth century, the second paper looks at race-science debates in Africa through the figure of Africanus Horton. It offers a counter-history to European histories of race-science (Stepan 1982; Seth 2018) by arguing that Africans engaged, and in many ways resisted, race-science theories as early in the nineteenth-century. Moving to Ottoman Iraq, the third paper offers a fascinating microhistory of a Baghdad physician licensed in France through a curious play re-published in 1911 after the Ottoman loss of Libyan territory following Italy’s invasion in 1911. The fourth and final paper looks at the movement of corpses between Bombay, England, Najaf and Karbala to show how international regimes of law and mobility were undergirded by sanitary concerns and a form of global necropolitics. Together, these papers thus offer new insights into Histories of Science and Technology and Global History by rethinking their Western and European focus and unearthing new case studies from the Global South.
