ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

An informal Network of Public Health in Eastern India, 1900 to 1947: American Missionaries, Minority Women Doctors, and Maternal Health

• In Event: Health During and After the British Empire

English Abstract

The expansion of colonial Assam’s tea industry transformed the province into a key enclave of imperial power and productivity and a critical node of an “informal network of public health” centrally involving American missionaries. My paper adds to the growing scholarship on the history of missionaries in public health in colonial India, as well as the histories of doctors and medical professionals from minority groups in the backdrop of internationalization and uniformization of public health in the twentieth century. It proposes that the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society run Hospital for Women and Children in Gauhati in British Assam, established in 1924, with support from the Davison Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Red Cross and the Government of India provides a pioneering example of the institutionalization of maternal healthcare, supported by an “informal network of public health” involving local and transnational actors. The paper further argues that the hospital serves as an important historical example for examining how indigenous missionary doctors belonging to minority groups responded to colonial India’s “biomedical encounter” by appropriating avenues of medical professionalization through training and employment at American missionary medical institutions across colonial India. For instance, the paper focuses on one of India’s first woman doctors, Dr. Lahori Bhuyan, a graduate of the Woman’s Christian Medical School in Ludhiana who worked at the aforementioned hospital in Gauhati

Author

• Akshita Hazarika, Binghamton University