Introduction
The article’s purpose is to explain why the colonial and post-colonial era approaches are ill-suited to assessing medicine in Africa, the Subcontinent, and British India. The author emphasizes that British scientists transferred many scientific approaches to the evaluation of medicine in the then colonies, propagating the mistakes that occurred in home health policies. The author also believes that scientists unfairly focused only on the ability of the colonies to integrate into ‘modern’ British medicine, which had many shortcomings. Therefore, she considers the trend towards the revival of traditional and indigenous medicine in the former colonies to be successful and supports the idea of reviving scientific discourse in the context of a more ‘pure’ analysis.
Research and Analysis Summary
The scholar provides extensive research based on the analysis of conferences regarding African and Subcontinental social sciences held during the last 20 years and the 19th-century British Indian legislation. The analysis features the impact of various middle and late-19th-century Acts that regulated public medicine both in Britain and its colonies. The author widely criticizes such acts as misogynistic and degrading the rights of lower social classes. Indigenous medicine at the time was perceived as inexistent and did not receive scholarly attention until the 2000s, when Ayurvedic practices and other traditional medicine began to be widely discussed in the research. Previously, it was seen through the lens of rhetoric condemnation of folk and tribal practitioners and other branches of medicine like homeopathy and balneology, just as it was done in Britain regarding the snake oil sellers and ‘Sequahs.’
Issues Identified and Key Messages
The author analyzes the history of colonial medicine and its ‘predominant conceptual paradigms.’ She says that scholars were mainly concerned with the status of the colonies ‘modernity’ and celebrates the latest shift in focus to the “multiplicity of indigenous medicine” (Ernst, 2007, p. 505). The scholar claims it to be a more detailed and balanced approach and more evidence-driven. She criticizes the previous methods for placing inherently misleading research questions. The discourse of the ‘colonizers’ and ‘colonized’ is also widely criticized, as it led to simplifications and generalizations. Interestingly, the 1980s were again analyzed from the angle of ‘western medical intervention’ to Africa that happened much earlier and mostly focused on relations of race, science, and medicine. Also, in the 1990s, the Foucaultian paradigms focused on power degraded Indian medicine to a ‘colonial’ one.
Conclusion
Thus, the author criticizes the old approaches to medical history and social sciences research concerning the former British colonies. According to the author, British research overly emphasizes its interventional position, sidelining the indigenous Ayurvedic and other types of medicine. She says that the old attitudes reduced the social dimensions to the issues of colonial hegemony and resistance to it. These attitudes also analyzed the ways it was accepted, like in the articles concerning the 19th-century medical acts in the Indian colonized state.
Reference
Ernst, W. (2007). Beyond east and west. From the history of colonial medicine to the social history of medicine (s) in south Asia. Social History of Medicine, 20(3), 505-524.