Four basic changes principally augured the beginning of the new medicine: (a) a conceptual change of the two-dimensional bodily image to the three-dimensional one; (b) the treatment of the patient in a hospital setting, not in his/her domestic environs; (c) touching and measuring the patient’s body with a stethoscope, thermometer and other modes of inspection; and (d) a transition to a new type of “modern” identity, that is, from the socially embedded individual to “case number” in a hospital.
Again, before dealing with details of the gestation period for the Calcutta Medical College (CMC), we may focus on another phenomenon or medical experiment which was successfully practiced in Egypt before the foundation of the CMC and might have catalyzed CMC’s formation.
A French military surgeon Antoine Barthelemy Clot (fondly named Clot Bey – Bey is a Turkic title for chieftain) was able to establish Egypt’s first medical school adjacent to the military hospital. With the viceroy’s approval and support, both schools of medicine and veterinary medicine opened in 1827 and a successive midwifery school in 1832.[1] Courses taught in Clot Bey’s medical school were – (1) Anatomy and Physiology, (2) Hygiene and Medical Jurisprudence, (3) Pathology and In-Patient Care, (4) Pathology and Out-Patient Care, and (5) Surgery and Obstetrics.
Clot Bey’s achievement was first mentioned in February, 1839, in the Calcutta Monthly Journal – “we believe, by Clot Bey, an honoured name amongst the scientific pioneers of civilization our professors may proudly appropriate to themselves … in the regeneration of Egypt, medicine has been, and ought to be, one of the most powerful instruments.”[2]
In 1839, when the first batch of the graduates – then they were given the “Letters Testimonials”, not any graduate degree – passed out from the CMC, the entire mode of teaching, system of examination and the functioning of the CMC was deeply scrutinized in the report. I shall come to this issue later on. Until then CMC was an experiment to the colonial government. However, the report mentioned with importance – “The experiment under consideration, it is believed, is similar to that successfully tried in Egypt by Clot Bey.”[3]
It is now historically well established that dissection was made mandatory in the Parisian hospitals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It can be summarized thus,
The patients were poor, less articulate, less troublesome, and it was much easier to carry out research on them (especially statistically based research which required large numbers in one place – the hospital). Moreover, the advantage of the poor was that the large numbers of post-mortems that were carried out would elicit no complaints from influential families.[4]
All these observations are a definite pointer to a social condition where economic changes are going, forcing people to become penniless and uprooted. A few more characteristics of hospital medicine which took a definite institutional shape in Parisian hospital may be elaborated. Earlier on, as a patient recounted how he or she fell ill, the story itself was the object of scrutiny by doctor and patient alike. Both were, in effect, able to hold the narrative up to the light and make of it what they would. “By the 1780s, the patient’s narrative was no longer the focus of inquiry in the infirmary.”[5] Regarding teaching at a Paris hospital one American student described his experience,
there were hundreds, nay thousands of individuals, employed in demonstrating, teaching, and unraveling, in every possible way, the most intricate subjects, in every branch of our science and art, and for a compensation so exceedingly small, and, oftentimes, without any compensation at all, as to be within the limits of the poorest and most destitute student. … Above all, I found that the regular lectures in the different hospitals and institutions, by men of the first eminence, were paid for by government, and gratuitous, as respected the pupil.[6]
It is important to remember that the Parisian hospitals (unlike most of the English medical schools for anatomical teaching) were controlled by the government, which employed clinicians to attend patients and to teach, and, thus, “fostered the access of instructors and students to the bodies of living patients and their remains after death. By contrast, the London hospitals were private charitable institutions with lay boards of governors that vested medical control in a small number of socially elite physicians and surgeons.”[7]
Joan Lane reminds us that the changes in hospitals in the nineteenth century were in important areas like medical teaching, and the whole profession expanded as never before. The acute sick came to “outnumber the long-term chronic patients…the hospitals became more ‘medicalised’…”[8] The French experience of the rise of hospital medicine heralded the closing hour of medical medievalism. It was no longer possible to practice without examination. “Surgeons, used to extirpating the lesions of the disease, and physicians, used to administering systemic medicaments, all suddenly now needed a blanket system that could unite heretofore disparate perspectives on the ‘seats and causes of disease’.”[9]
One important issue should be said about dissection and medical learning and, also, about the production of medical knowledge (from the patient to the absolute necessity of dissection) which had undergone paradigmatic transformation at Paris hospital following the French Revolution. “Bichat told doctors what to do: ‘You may take notes for twenty years from morning to night at the bedside of the sick,’ his Anatomie generale (1801) [General Anatomy] drily observed, ‘and all will be to you only a confusion of symptoms … a train of incoherent phenomena.’ But start cutting bodies open and, hey presto, ‘this obscurity will soon disappear’. Here was the medicine of the all-powerful gaze.”[10] Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) was a French anatomist and pathologist. He is regarded as the father of Histology. To his credit, without the aid of a microscope, Bichat distinguished 21 types of elementary tissues from which the organs of the human body are composed.
However, in his intriguing paper, Pickstone argues that “Bichat and his audience shared the concerns of governing groups with the rational ordering of society, and within their spheres of concern and responsibility, they were themselves engaged in the practice of reform. There was a strong accord between the interests of these professionals and the interests of government”[11]. Moreover, “until the rise of Napoleon, intellectuals were in a position to establish their preferred organizational forms and to extend the currency of their outlook. In Bichat’s enormously successful physiology we can see these same concerns ’embodied’ and propagated both as theory and as experimental practice. Bichat’s physiology, I shall argue, re-presented a kind of bureaucratic corporatism.”[12] These are definitely good issues for lively scholarly debate.
The bedside in hospital itself becomes a site of data-collection. Application of measurement or numbers to medicine, as Trohler argues, may be seen under three broad headings – (a) “statistical quantification” or measurements made in relation to a single individual or place, (b) “medical statistics’ or measurements or numerical statements relating to small groups of individual, and (c) ‘vital statistics” or measurements or numerical statements relating to large groups of individuals or even to a population as a whole.[13] ‘The body is sampled, invaded, measured and inspected, in order to yield images and information’ and it is “dispersed through multiple sites of investigation throughout this organizational complexities.”[14] Waddington reminds us that the body is in no way “naturally” a peculiarly intimate and private thing, rather it has come to be so regarded gradually as part of the civilizing process.[15]
The medical encounter began to demand that patients reveal the secrets of their bodies, both by allowing physical examination and by giving their medical history under questioning by the doctor.[16] In Indian culture, revealing one’s body to the examination of an alien person was unprecedented. With this new vision of hospital medicine, there emerged an altogether novel thread, which bound culture, the hospital, society, and the notion of profession inextricably together. The body rather than the discursive patient was becoming the real object of medicine.
Pickstone tersely comments, “The hospitals of England experienced no revolutionary change, but here too the new attitudes took root.”[17] He also notes that the health crisis of 1831-32 coincided with the political crisis over electoral reform.[18] We shall shortly see that this was true for India, especially in the foundation of the CMC. As argued by Maulitz, for the first time in modern Europe, there was a context, a set of structures and arrangements centred on the existence of a “newly ecumenical faculty, within which a new theoretical canon could flourish.”[19] As pointed out by the scholars, these new set of structures and methodologies were a product of the changing time.
Somewhat similar changes were taking place in Bengal, and in India, during the first three decades of the 19th century. It must be stressed that it was never like politically free and economically market-driven states of Europe. Rather the changes happening here were engrafted to a great extent. It started primarily from the point of desire of the upper echelon of society on the one hand, and general populace at large who were mostly without any effective treatment for various diseases to a great extent.
According Ann La Berge and Caroline Hannaway there were five “characteristics of Paris Medicine that gave it this prideful place”.[20] These included – (1) “the rise of pathological anatomy, or the systematic correlation of clinical observations of the external manifestation of the disease with the lesions found in the organs at the time of autopsy”, (2) the transformation brought about by its being made not just on dozens of cases but on thousands, (3) the change in clinical activity form primarily listening to the patient’s story to making an active physical examination of patients through large-scale application of new and improvised methods of diagnosis, i.e percussion, auscultation, and, most notably, the insignia of modern medicine, the stethoscope, (4) the hospital as the locus of medical activity and research, (5) the use of medical statistics in the analysis of case histories and evaluation of therapy. 1794 is taken as the year of change for French medicine in all these aspects discussed above.[21]
As argued by modern scholars, the stethoscope was not only a technological innovation or intervention, it was more than that.
“Every time the stethoscope was (and is) applied to a patient, it reinforced the fact that the patient possessed an analysable body with discrete organs and tissues which might harbour a pathological lesion. Thus, in the history of medicine it is not the doctors who have dominated, subjugated and objectified the patient; rather it is the stethoscope coupled to an anonymous gaze which has had a major impact in celebrating and sustaining the physical nature of the body during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”[22]
William Hunter, the great 18th century Scotish anatomist, surgeon and obstetrician of his day, urged his students to gain “a Necessary Inhumanity” by dissecting the dead. Hunter knew that trainee doctors could not be too tender, that this inhumanity would stand his students in good stead in dealing with the surgery of the day, which—in the days before anaesthesia, antisepsis or transfusion—needed to be not just accurate but fast if it was to be successful.[23] Which was “a necessary inhumanity” of William Hunter is “clinical detachment” in today’s medical vocabulary. More specifically, as told by William Hunter to his students, “It is dissection alone that can teach us, where we may cut the living body, with freedom & dispatch; and where we may venture, with great circumspection and delicacy, and where we must not, upon any account attempt it. This informs the head, gives dexterity to the hand, and familiarises the heart with a sort of necessary inhumanity, the use of cutting instruments upon our fellow-creatures.”[24]
With the acquisition of large-scale surgical knowledge and dissection on one hand, and applying medical relief to the patients on the other erased the distinction between a physician and a surgeon. Both became a new kind doctor – in whom medicine, surgery, apothecary and obstetrics have all combined.
In an article on Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec, who invented the stethoscope in 1816, Lancet observed –
From noting the sounds he heard with his stethoscope during physical examinations of patients and linking them to pathological changes at post-mortem examination, Laënnec learned to recognise pulmonary diseases including bronchitis, bronchiectasis, emphysema, hydrothorax, pleurisy, pneumothorax, pneumonia, pulmonary gangrene, pulmonary oedema, and tuberculosis. Laënnec also came up with terms that are still in use – eg, bronchophony, egophony, and rales. He described normal and abnormal sounds of respiration and different types of rales: crackling, crepitant, gurgling, sonorous, and whistling. Laënnec noted that pectoriloquy was a sign indicating cavities in the lung caused by tuberculosis.[25]
At this juncture, we can cite a significant occurrence in Indian context. W. E. E. Conwell, the staff surgeon of Madras Presidency of East India Company (EIC), was a student of Laënnec. He wrote in his book – “by submitting to the Profession generally, detailed statements of pulmonary diseases in India; I fulfil my promise to that effect, made at the request of my excellent and learned master; the late M. Laenec, of Paris.”[26] Conwell had minutely described 25 cases. In each case, symptoms of the patients were carefully noted while they were alive. Through post-mortem, after their deaths, he matched pathological findings with the symptoms of the living patients. He used two useful tools for this purpose – the stethoscope and autopsy.
Summarily speaking, before the foundation of CMC, both anatomical dissection the use of the stethoscope were in vogue in the medical department of the British army.[27] Teachers of the CMC were recruited from Indian Medical Service to teaching post. As a result, from the very beginning an altogether different academic milieu was prevalent. Moreover, during the first 30 years of 19th century, most of the IMS people did their graduation in Edinburgh University, which was by far the best university in Great Britain.[28]
As have been discussed in the previous chapter about “black doctors” in the EIC’s military service, in course of time it became apparent that there remained some glaring flaws in such mode of training. These could be enumerated thus – (1) such little medical training was not at all useful for the purpose, (2) without being trained systematically and somewhat rigorously the capability of Indian trainees could not be fully utilized, and (3) the proposed training should take into account specificities of local condition, trainees’ psyche and the power to acquire the mode of training. During the early nineteenth century, there was a dearth of British officers, as “there were some corps of 1000 men in which there were only three European officers”, and the “deficiency in the number of medical officers was in some parts of India at present truly lamentable”.[29] To redress this deficiency, the authorities began preparations for the foundation of the NMI in 1822, despite opposition in their own ranks, which was labelled a “new crusade against the spread of knowledge in India”.[30]
But European mode of training instituted in India had undergone a kind of refraction, not the European mode of teaching in a complete replication. In another context Allan Bewell has remarked – “The British experience of disease raised questions about where colonial contact begins and ends as the imperial metroplole with its heterogeneous, impoverished, and anonymous populations seemed more and more to be a simulacrum of the periphery.”[31] Moreover, he added, “There was a mutual refraction of colonial and metropolitan medical theory … The pathothologizing of the urban working class occurred in tandem with the pathologizing of colonial peoples.”[32]
However, to transcend all these lacunae in auxiliary medical training, a long and protracted debate took place regarding “Education of Native Doctors”[33] It was argued –
Of all the sciences studied by the Asiatics, that of anatomy and medicine is the least understood and cultivated, and therefore in India it is universally admitted that the British government could not have established an institution calculated to be of greater public benefit, not only to the civil and military branches of the service, but to the natives generally, that the Native Medical Institution.[34]
Foundation of the NMI
“On 9th of May 1822, the Medical Board of Bengal “submitted their plan of a school for native doctors, which meeting with approbation of the Government, a general order was issued on the 21st of June 1822, establishing the school on the proposed plan”.[35] The order contained 39 clauses, and was signed by William Casement, Secretary to the Government Military Department.[36]
The declaration of the NMI was titled as “Foundation of a Native Medical Establishment”. The first paragraph read thus:
The difficulty of procuring a proper description of people to fill the situations of native doctor under this Presidency, and the consequent insufficiency of that part of the medical establishment to the performance of its prescribed and important duties, include the Most Noble the Governor General in Council, in order to provide persons properly qualified by a previous education for such situations, as well in the civil as in the military branch of the service, to direct:[37]
It was followed by 39 clauses. It is apparent that the ‘native doctors’, with a leap forward from previous modes of training, should have some ‘previous education’ and in the school should be trained to be ‘properly qualified’. A definite structure for educating native doctors did evolve.
Clause 2 read thus – “The object of the institution will be to educate native doctors for the civil and military branches of the service.” It was stated that there would be no less than twenty students. Clause 5 read – “No person to be admitted a student who is not at the time of his application capable of reading and writing the Hindoostanee language in the Nagree or the Persian character, and whose age is under eighteen nor above twenty-six years.”[38] Both Hindus and Muslims were equally eligible “with the sole condition that they be persons of respectable cast and character”[39] (Clause 6). It transpires that a “secular social hierarchy” was in the making. It was secular in the sense that the character of education transcended religious barriers, but “hierarchical” in the sense that the requisite necessity was “persons of respectable cast and character”. The students were “to be regularly enlisted as soldiers”[40] (Clause 8), which means that it was a military education, not a civil one. To supervise and conduct the studies of the student a post of Superintendent was created –
He is to direct the studies, practical pursuits, and general conduct of the students; to prepare manuals of the most necessary and intelligible parts of medical science for their use in native language; to give demonstrations, and deliver courses of lectures to them on these subjects; and generally to take every available means of imparting to them a practical acquaintance with the diseases of most frequent occurrence in India, the remedies best suited to their cure, and the proper mode of applying those remedies.[41] (Clause 9)
The students were to be attached to “the Presidency general hospital, the king’s hospitals, the native hospital (with the consent of the governors)”[42] Those who were attached to “the several European hospitals will be placed particularly under the apothecaries respectively belonging to the hospitals, to attend the hospital wards and dispensary”[43] and “to assist in dressing the patients, in preparing and administering medicines”[44]. Those attached to the native hospital had to perform similar duties and tasks.
“During the whole term of his education each student will be supported at the public charge, for which purpose the sum of sonat rupees eight per mensem will be allowed to him”[45] For the first time in India during medical training of the Indian students the term “class of public servants” was applied.[46] Their pay was raised to twenty five rupees when in the field. After their completion of training they were to be provided with a “certificate, that the general character and professional conduct of individual deserve” and the “certificate to be countersigned by the superintending surgeon of the division.”[47]
“The salary of the Superintendent is fixed at sonat rupees eight hundred per mensem, with an establishment of a moonshee to assist in reading and translating, at sonat rupees sixty, a writer at thirty, and a peon at five rupees per mensem.”[48] James Jameson was the first Superintendent of the NMI. Unfortunately Jameson died on 20th January, 1823, and was succeeded by Breton (Peter Breton)”[49] NMI started its classes and training with only a single teacher, without any fixed curriculum or definite period of time. Historically it was the first educational institution of its kind in British India.
The “period of nativity/gestation period” for “hospital medicine” began to function as the harbinger of modern medicine in India. NMI (1822) was the first medical school in British India followed by Bombay School for Native Doctors in 1824.
Prelude to Its Functioning
“The earliest definite regulations on the subject are those issued in the G.O. of 15th June, 1812, published in the C.G. of 2nd July, 1812, directing the training of European and Eurasian boys to form a Sub-medical Service for the army. Natives of India, however, were not admitted to this class. A similar class was started in Madras about the same time.”[50] As we have seen in the previous chapter, the first real medical school in India was the school for training native doctors, established in Calcutta by G.O.G.G. of 21st June, 1822, published in the C.G. of 27th June, 1822.
Finally, NMI started its functioning in 1823. It was located in a rented house at Park Street, Calcutta, on the estate of its superintendent Peter Breton. The superintendent lived on the estate and the teaching and residential areas were all on the campus. On his death in 1830, a rent of Rs. 230 was paid to the estate’s executors.[51]
Crawford informs us – “Similar medical schools were started in Bombay in 1826, by Bombay G.O. of 1st Jan., 1826, and in Madras in 1827, by Madras G.O. of 20th March, 1827. The Bombay school was kept up for only six years, and was abolished by Bombay G.O. of 20th June, 1832.”[52]
Before delving into the kind of medical education imparted at the NMI we may benefit from some different observations regarding the specific nature of Indian population at large regarding medical advice. John M’Cosh (some time lecturer of clinical medicine at the CMC) wrote – “Generally speaking, the Natives prefer their own countrymen as their medical attendants on ordinary occasions, and take the advice of the European in extreme cases.”[53] To note, the book was published in 1841 – four years after the foundation of the CMC and nineteen years after the foundation of the NMI. So, it may be safely said that even after the institutional functioning of modern medicine for some decades there some sort of tug of war between acceptance and rejection of modern medicine.
It leads to a few questions for our engaged consideration. First, there arose a bidirectional contradiction where the state did want that people should internalize the knowledge and techniques produced by state on the one hand, and modern medical knowledge must insinuate into local habits, psyche, thought process and custom etc. on the other. Second. if this process had not succeeded the whole-scale application of modern medical knowledge was well nigh impossible. Moreover, modern medicine represented the human face of violent and aggressive imperialism in many aspects.
What M’Cosh told above was more applicable to lower echelons of Indian society. The higher echelon was more receptive to and, even, collaborator with the “modernizing” project of the British. Here we can adduce two strong examples from the then two most influential personalities of Bengal. In 1822, Rammohan Roy, one of the pioneers of Indian ‘Renaissance’, sent a selection of 10 ‘Hindoo crania’ to be examined by Dr. George Paterson.[54] It is tempting to cite a part of the famous letter of Ram Mohan Roy to Dr. George Murray Patterson, “Dear Sir, – I regret that I should have forgotten the commission with you honoured me sometime ago, and feel ashamed of for myself of such an omission. I now have the pleasure of sending you the accompanying ten skulls; if you find them calculated to answer your purpose, I will, with equal pleasure, send as many as you think sufficient for your present researches.”[55]
In a somewhat unusual letter on 1st January 1836 to Mr. J. N. Batten, the District Collector of Saharanpur, Dwarakanath Tagore wrote –
“My dear Batten, Well done…I have converted at least 200 good Hindu boys by giving them the holy water that comes from Corbonell & Co., so that by and by they will all sing a chorus with me at some of the chapels.”[56]
Similar mentality could also be perceived among better off common people too. A ryot with a wife and two children seldom earned more than “five rupees a month, out of which he ha[d] to defray all expenses”[57]. The common people of Bengal, it was reported, had to bear “the barbarous treatment of the Kobirajes” and the half-educated quack – an Eastern type of Dr Sangrado who required a fee of ‘one rupee in many cases from the poor fellows”.[58]
In 1822, some people of Calcutta wrote to the editor of the Sangbad Coumudy (the Moon of Intelligence), “The people of this country have been relieved from a variety of diseases since it has been in the possession of the English nation; but one of a greater weight than all these troubles still remains to be removed”[59]. Moreover, “Seeing the proper medical treatment and skill of the European physicians, we could wish that our patients were treated by them, that they might sooner or better restored to health.”[60] They wrote that the ten rupees which poor people earned every month was barely sufficient to sustain the family, and, consequently, “the populace have generally not the means of calling in a European doctor … whereby the poor might avail themselves of the medical treatment of European doctors”.[61] They argued, “Were the Hindoo physicians to instruct their children in the knowledge of their own medical Shasters first, and then place them as practitioners under the superintendence of European physicians, it would prove infinitely advantageous to the Natives of the country.”[62]
According to the reporting and emphasizing “On the Natives studying medicine”, this endeavour would benefit the society in four ways. Firstly, pupils would be acquainted with both the English and Bengali mode of learning. Secondly, “by going to all places, and attending to poor as well as rich families, and to persons of every age and sex, he could render service to all”. Thirdly, “he could go to such places as were inaccessible to European doctors”. And lastly, “this kind of medical knowledge, and the mode of treatment by passing from hand to hand, would be at length spread over the whole country”[63].
The new medicine, heralding its universality with the words ‘[for] every age and sex’, also incorporated a kind of secular nature into it. Bearing only the faint trace of the gurukul system, in which knowledge could be passed ‘from hand to hand’, the English mode of teaching had to be incorporated for better efficacy. It was in such an intellectual climate and bolstered by such favourable social attitudes (at least in a particular section of society) that the NMI struck its deep roots in Bengal.
________________________
[1] Basil H. Abul-Enein and William Puddy, “Contributions of Antoine Barthélémy Clot (1793-1868): A historiographical reflection of public health in Ottoman Egypt”, Journal of Medical Biography, August 2016, 24 (3):427-32.
[2] “The Medical College”, Calcutta Monthly Journal 1840, Third Series, Vol. 5: 84.
[3] Report of the General Committee on Public Instruction (1839), Appendix, 38th Resolution, 90. Hereafter GCPI with the year of publication.
[4] Andrew Wear, “Introduction”, 6. [Emphasis added]
[5] Marry E. Fissel, idem, 99.
[6] Warner, “Paradigm Lost or Paradise Declining?”, 344.
[7] Ibid, p. 343.
[8] Lane, A Social History of Medicine, 87.
[9]. Maulitz, “The pathological tradition”, 178.
[10] Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 307.
[11] John V. Pickstone, “Bureaucracy, Liberalism and the Body in Post-Revolutionary France: Bichat’s Physiology and the Paris School of Medicine”, History of Science, June 1981, 19 (2): 115-142. Quotation on pp. 115-116
[12] Ibid, 116.
[13] Ulrich Trohler, Quantification in British Medicine and Surgery 1750-1830, with special reference to Its Introduction into Therapeutics (PhD Thesis, University College London, 1978), 41.
[14] Paul Atkinson, Medical Talk and Medical Clinic: The Liturgy of the Clinic (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 1995), 61.
[15] Ivan Waddington (1973), “The Role of the Hospital in the Development of Modern Medicine: A Sociological Analysis,” Sociology 7(2): 211-224 (219).
[16] For an insightful discussion see, Deborah Lupton, Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease, and the Body in Western Societies (Thousand Oakes, CA: 2003).
[17] John V. Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society: A history of hospital development in Manchester and its Region, 1752-1946 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 48.
[18] Ibid, 54.
[19] Russel Charles Maulitz. Morbid Appearances: The Anatomy of Pathology in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4.
[20] “Introduction” in Constructing Paris Medicine, ed. Caroline Hannaway and Ann La Berge (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 4.
[21] Ibid, 4.
[22] David Armstrong, “Bodies of Knowledge/Knowledge of Bodies”, in Reassessing Foucault: Power, medicine and the body, ed. Colin Jones and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), 17-27. Quotation on p. 23.
[23] Ruth Richardson, “A Necessary Inhumanity?” J Med Ethics: Medical Humanities, December 2000, 26 (2):104–106.
[24] Lynda Payne, With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 103. [Emphasis in original]
[25] Farhat Yaqub, “René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec”, Lancet, October 1, 2015, 3 (10): 755-756. Quotation on p. 756.
[26] William E. E. Conwell, Observations Chiefly on Pulmonary Disease in India and an Essay on the Use of Stethoscope (Malacca: Mission Press, 1829), iii. Actually, the book was sent to press in 1827. But it was finally published in 1829.
[27] For detailed discussion, see, Jayanta Bhattacharya, “Anatomical Knowledge and East-West Exchange” in Medical Encounters in British India, ed. Deepak Kumar and Raj Sekhar Basu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 40-60.
[28] D. G. Crawford, Roll of the Indian Medical Service, 1615-1930 (London: w. Thacker & Co., 1930), in 2 volumes, vol. 2, Appendix IX, 642.
[29] “Debate at the East India House,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies 23 (1827): 97-175. Quotation on p. 166.
[30] “Liberality of the Indian Government towards the Native Medical Institution of Bengal,” Oriental Herald and Journal of General Literature 10 (1826): 17-25. Quotation on p. 24.
[31] Allan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 12-13.
[32] Ibid, 270.
[33] “Education of Native Doctors”, Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register, July 1826, (26): 111-121.
[34] Ibid, 112.
[35] Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company; and also an Appendix and Index. 1, Public (London: House of Commons, 16 August, 1832): 447.
[36] William Casement, “Formation of a Native Medical Establishment”, Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies, January-June 1823, 15 (86): 170-173.
[37] Ibid, 170. [Italics added]
[38] Ibid. [Italics added]
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid, 170.
[42] Ibid, 171, Clause 18.
[43] Ibid, Clause 21.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid, 172. Clause 27. [Italics added]
[46] Ibid. Clause 29.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid, 172. Clause 36.
[49] Crawford, A History, vol. 1, 318.
[50] Crawford, A History, vol. 2, 434.
[51] Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600-1900 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 73.
[52] Crawford, A History, vol. 2, 434.
[53] John M’Cosh, Medical Advice to the Indian Stranger (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1841), 11.
[54] George Murray Paterson, “On the Phrenology of Hindostan”, Transactions of the Phrenological Society (Edinburgh, 1824), 430-448.
[55] Transactions of the Phrenological Society, idem, 434-435.
[56] Dwarakanath Tagore File, DTF (GF), 01/38 (Visva Bharati Archives, Santiniketan).
[57] “Miscellaneous Critical Notices,” Calcutta Review, 1854, 13 (25): xviii-xx. Quotation on p. xix.
[58] Ibid. This particular issue related to Dr. Sangrado is a character of Le Sage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas. He is portrayed as bad quack in the novel.
[59] “Miscellaneous – Bengally Newspapers,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register, October 1822, 14 (82): 385-394. Quotation on p. 387.
[60] Ibid, 387.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Ibid, 388.
[63] Ibid, 388.
