ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sacred Experiments: Imperial medicine, Christianity and Patient Resilience in British Indian Leper Asylums

• In Event: Practising Medicine in Colonial India

English Abstract

Colonial leper asylums in British India might seem like an unlikely site that could reveal the convergences and contestations between multiple worlds that are conventionally understood to be mutually exclusive in the history of science. Yet, a history of these asylums could tell us how the histories of imperial biomedicine and Christianity coalesced even during the heydays of bacteriology and tropical medicine in the early twentieth century; how the histories of disciplinary institutions and scientific experiments were interlinked; how captive patients in the colonised context negotiated and even resisted a medico-spiritual regime of imperial control. This talk argues that a renewed focus on the colonial leper asylums in British India allows us simultaneously to raise these fundamental themes, which resonate with the newly emergent histories of global and colonial science and medicine. In elucidating these questions, this talk establishes these leper asylums as a unique site where colonised diseased subalterns encountered, suffered, engaged with and defied different strands of British power that were concurrently imperial, biomedical and Christian.

Author

• Shinjini Das, University of East Anglia