Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Nationalizing the Body
- Introduction
- Chapter I Healers in Context: Forgotten Pioneers
- Chapter II Daktari Prints: The World of Bengali Printing and the Multiple Inscriptions of DaktariMedicine
- Chapter III Contagious Nationalism: Contagion and the Actualization of the Nation
- Chapter IV Political Plague: Diagnosing a Neo-Hindu Modernity
- Chapter V Endemic Commerce: Cholera and the Medical Market
- Chapter VI Dhatu Dourbalya: Diagnosing the Rhizoid Pathologies of Weakness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
from Nationalizing the Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Nationalizing the Body
- Introduction
- Chapter I Healers in Context: Forgotten Pioneers
- Chapter II Daktari Prints: The World of Bengali Printing and the Multiple Inscriptions of DaktariMedicine
- Chapter III Contagious Nationalism: Contagion and the Actualization of the Nation
- Chapter IV Political Plague: Diagnosing a Neo-Hindu Modernity
- Chapter V Endemic Commerce: Cholera and the Medical Market
- Chapter VI Dhatu Dourbalya: Diagnosing the Rhizoid Pathologies of Weakness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Meeting the Daktars
This book is about daktari medicine. Simply put, daktari medicine was the name given to the medicine practised by daktars. But who exactly were the daktars?
The term itself, as we shall see in Chapter I, did not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century. Even then they did not constitute a single homogenous group but were rather a composite group made up of many heterogeneous elements whose social status and pedagogical background both differed widely. Yet, after the 1860s the word daktar clearly referred to people who were thought to practise ‘western’ medicine. John Iliffe's comprehensive study East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession mentions the development of similar vernacular designations for some early African practitioners of ‘western’ medicine. In some cases the terms used to refer to them drew upon older ‘indigenous’ vocabularies, such as mganga or omusawo or, as in the Kenyan dakitari, the term was, like in Bengal, a vernacularization of the English ‘doctor’.
To what extent these daktars drew upon earlier traditions of South Asians practising ‘western’ medicine cannot now be ascertained with any degree of certainty. This much, however, is certain: South Asia had been exposed to ‘western’ medicine for at least two centuries before the term daktar emerged as a socially significant identity. Numerous European medical travellers such as Francois Bernier, Niocolao Manucci, Garcia d'Orta and John Ovington, visited Mughal South Asia.
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- Information
- Nationalizing the BodyThe Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, pp. 1 - 34Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009