The idea of contagion, i.e., the transfer of disease from one who is afflicted to one who is not, though seemingly obvious to most contemporary readers, has had a complicated and chequered history within the medical traditions of the world. In the premodern era, as in the modern era—and some have suggested even in postmodern contexts—the idea of contagion has been a powerful and polysemic idea. The only extant studies of the idea in South Asia, however, pertain to premodern societies. The discussion of the idea in the history of medicine in colonial India remains merely incidental to concerns about epidemic diseases. This has led to a rather simplistic understanding of the concept with regard to its usage by colonial Indian doctors. In stark contrast to this, studies based in other colonial contexts, such as Australia, have suggested that the relationship between contagion and colonial modernity was anything but simple and straightforward. Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker have suggested that the ‘geographies, policies and identities’ that emerged under colonial modernity through the entanglement of ‘metaphor and public policy … intertwin[ing] personal conduct with the management of populations, nations and economies’ within the idea of contagion, were rich, polyvalent and had even an almost fantastic dreamlike character to them.

The study of the history of contagion amongst Indian doctors in the late nineteenth century raises some interesting methodological as well as conceptual problems.