Western medicine as contested knowledge

Western medicine as contested knowledge

Author: Andrew Cunningham

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1526123576

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Medicine has always been a significant tool of an empire. This book focuses on the issue of the contestation of knowledge, and examines the non-Western responses to Western medicine. The decolonised states wanted Western medicine to be established with Western money, which was resisted by the WHO. The attribution of an African origin to AIDS is related to how Western scientists view the disease as epidemic and sexually threatening. Veterinary science, when applied to domestic stock, opens up fresh areas of conflict which can profoundly influence human health. Pastoral herd management was the enemy of land enclosure and efficient land use in the eyes of the colonisers. While the native Indians of the United States were marginal participants in the delivery or shaping of health care, the Navajo passively resisted Western medicine by never giving up their own religion-medicine. The book discusses the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in eradicating the yellow fever in Brazil and hookworm in Mexico. The imposition of Western medicine in British India picked up with plague outbreaks and enforced vaccination. The plurality of Indian medicine is addressed with respect to the non-literate folk medicine of Rajasthan in north-west India. The Japanese have been resistant to the adoption of the transplant practices of modern scientific medicine. Rumours about the way the British were dealing with plague in Hong Kong and Cape Town are discussed. Thailand had accepted Western medicine but suffered the effects of severe drug resistance to the WHO treatment of choice in malaria.


Western medicine as contested knowledge

Western medicine as contested knowledge

Author: Andrew Cunningham

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1526162946

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Medicine has always been a significant tool of an empire. This book focuses on the issue of the contestation of knowledge, and examines the non-Western responses to Western medicine. The decolonised states wanted Western medicine to be established with Western money, which was resisted by the WHO. The attribution of an African origin to AIDS is related to how Western scientists view the disease as epidemic and sexually threatening. Veterinary science, when applied to domestic stock, opens up fresh areas of conflict which can profoundly influence human health. Pastoral herd management was the enemy of land enclosure and efficient land use in the eyes of the colonisers. While the native Indians of the United States were marginal participants in the delivery or shaping of health care, the Navajo passively resisted Western medicine by never giving up their own religion-medicine. The book discusses the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in eradicating the yellow fever in Brazil and hookworm in Mexico. The imposition of Western medicine in British India picked up with plague outbreaks and enforced vaccination. The plurality of Indian medicine is addressed with respect to the non-literate folk medicine of Rajasthan in north-west India. The Japanese have been resistant to the adoption of the transplant practices of modern scientific medicine. Rumours about the way the British were dealing with plague in Hong Kong and Cape Town are discussed. Thailand had accepted Western medicine but suffered the effects of severe drug resistance to the WHO treatment of choice in malaria.


The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872–1937

The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872–1937

Author: Connie A. Shemo

Publisher: Lehigh University Press

Published: 2011-10-16

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1611460867

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This is the first full-length study of the medical ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, who graduated from the medical school at the University of Michigan in 1896 and then ran dispensaries, hospitals, and nursing schools in China from the 1890s to the 1930s. Known in English-speaking countries as Drs. Ida Kahn and Mary Stone, they were well-known both in China and in the United States in the early twentieth century, but today have largely been forgotten. This book gives readers today the chance to know these fascinating women, whose stories shed light on many aspects of U.S.-China relations. At its broadest level, this study contributes to the development of a transnational women's history, deepening our understanding of how ideas about women have traveled across national boundaries.


The Western Medical Tradition

The Western Medical Tradition

Author: W. F. Bynum

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-03-20

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 9780521475655

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This book, first published in 2006, is an authoritative description of the important changes in Western medicine over the past two centuries.


Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914

Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914

Author: Linda Maria Ratschiller Nasim

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-02

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 3031271289

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This open access book offers an entangled history of hygiene by showing how knowledge of purity, health and cleanliness was shaped by evangelical medical missionaries and their encounters with people in West Africa. By tracing the interactions and negotiations of six Basel Mission doctors, who practised on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon from 1885 to 1914, the author demonstrates how notions of religious purity, scientific health and colonial cleanliness came together in the making of hygiene during the age of High Imperialism. The heyday of evangelical medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline during what became known as the Scramble for Africa. This book reveals that these projects were intertwined and that hygiene played an important role in all three of them. While most historians have examined modern hygiene as a European, bourgeois and scientific phenomenon, the author highlights both the colonial and the religious fabric of hygiene, which continues to shape our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day.


Health Policy in Britain's Model Colony

Health Policy in Britain's Model Colony

Author: Margaret Jones

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9788125027591

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Was Western medicine a positive benefit of colonialism or one of its agents of oppression? This question has prompted a vigorous historical and political debate and is explored here in the context of the 'model' British colony of Ceylon. In this study, Margaret Jones emphasises the need for both a broad perspective and a more complex analysis. Colonial medicine is critiqued not merelyu in the political and economic context of imperialism but also against the background of human needs and rights. Her research is underscored by a detailed analysis of public health measures and services in Ceylon. One of its key findings is the accommodation achieved between Western and indigenous medicine. Throughout this work, Jones provides nuanced readings of the categories of colonised and coloniser, as well as the concept of colonial medicine. Health Policy in Britain's Model Colony provides an understanding of historical trends while simultaneously avoiding generalisations that subsume events and actions. Written in a compelling and lucid style, it is a path-breaking contribution to the history of medicine.


Rural Disease Knowledge

Rural Disease Knowledge

Author: Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-07

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 104015154X

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Rural Disease Knowledge examines the ways in which knowledge of rural spaces and environments, on the one hand, and infectious diseases, on the other, have become inter-constituted since the late nineteenth century. With contributions by leading anthropologists and historians of medicine, it examines the epistemic co-constitution of the rural and of infectious diseases. Ranging from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia to Java, Tanzania, West and South Africa, and Britain, the chapters cover diverse geographies, timelines, and diseases, including plague, brucellosis, leishmaniasis, yaws, yellow fever, nagana, sleeping sickness, and Chagas disease. The book considers how human interactions with infectious diseases have impacted ways of knowing and acting on rural spaces and environments, and in turn how human interactions with rural spaces and environments have impacted ways of knowing and acting against infectious diseases. It reflects on how the rural has been configured as a space of either health or sickness over the centuries and around the globe, the role of rural landscapes in the epistemic emergence of microbiology and tropical medicine, and the interaction with global processes such as European imperialism, the emergence of capitalism, and postcolonial nation-building projects. The studies engage with current debates on decolonizing knowledge and highlight how local disease knowledge has troubled and unsettled hegemonic medical perspectives and created new ways of understanding the relationship between diseases and rural spaces and environments. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of medical anthropology, global health, and the history of medicine.


Western Science in Modern India

Western Science in Modern India

Author: Pratik Chakrabarti

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9788178240787

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The Book Is About Western Science In A Olonial World. It Asks: How Do We Understand The Transfer And Absorption Of Scientific Knowledge Across Diverse Cultures, From One Society To Another? This Monograph Will Interest Scientists, Historians And Sociologists, As Well As Students Of Imperialism And The History Of Ideas.


African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health

African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health

Author: William Beinart

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1847010830

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A much needed examination of contemporary approaches to animal healing in South Africa, informed by a strong understanding of history.


Public Health in the British Empire

Public Health in the British Empire

Author: Ryan Johnson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1136596453

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Over the last several decades, historians of public health in Britain’s colonies have been primarily concerned with the process of policy making in the upper echelons of the medical and sanitary administrations. Yet it was the lower level staff that formed the backbone of public health systems in the colonies. Although they constituted the bases of many colonies’ public health machinery, there is no consolidated study of these individuals to date. Public Health in the British Empire addresses this gap by bringing together historians studying intermediary and subordinate staff across the British Empire. Along with investigating the duties and responsibilities of medical and non-medical intermediary and subordinate personnel, the contributors to this volume show how the subjectivity of these agents influenced the manner in which they discharged their duties and how this in turn shaped policy. Even those working as low level assistants and aids were able to affect policy design. In this way, Public Health in the British Empire brings into sharp relief the disaggregated nature of the empire, thereby challenging the understanding of the imperial project as an enterprise conceived of and driven from the center.