Abstract
In Britain, the 1830s was a period of significant legal and intellectual change — the ‘Age of Reform’. The growing influence of liberalism, evangelism and utilitarianism reverberated across the political spectrum. This has led some historians to apply the same title to the period in British India. The ‘reformers’ of the Age of Reform have often been characterised as a collaborative band of ‘Anglicists’ and free traders vying against conservative ‘Orientalists’.1 The literature on the period usually examines the reforms implemented by the former group that included those centred on education, women and the law.2 While not wishing to minimise the significance of these reforms, this chapter examines a different current running through this period. While pushing forward territorially and ensuring that their ability to collect revenue was secure, the Company continued to be concerned with the ability of its army to remain powerful enough to function effectively. As such, the Company’s decision-making in the 1830s remained largely determined by its military, medical and fiscal concerns.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The term ‘Anglicists’ is used to describe the loosely knit alliance of liberal, evangelical utilitarian thinkers who pushed for changes to the way India was governed — to be ‘Anglicised’ — in among other things, the language of law and education. This group is portrayed in opposition to the ‘Orientalists’ — those who adopted a conservative approach to rule and believed that India should be gov-emed by its own laws, ‘traditions’ and institutions. See Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992);
John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974). A more recent notable exception to this comes with Ishita Pande’s recent work that highlights multivalent ‘Orientalisms’ and explores the role of medicine and science in shaping liberalism.
See Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (London: Routledge, 2010).
See Lucy Carroll, ‘Law, Custom and Statutory Social Reform: “The Hindu Widow Remarriage Act of 1856”’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, 4 (1983);
Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
For an examination of another perceived bodily ‘threat’ to the Company — namely ‘thugee’, see Radhika Singha, “‘Providential” Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation’, Modern Asian Studies 27, 1 (1993);
Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
For a study of the ideology and hierarchy of the Indian Civil Service and its Civilians, see Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London: Hambledon, 1993). For further detail, see Kathryn Tidrick’s discussion of Henry and John Lawrence and the so-called Tunjab school’ in Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character (London: Tauris, 1990).
For an examination of these Indian medical colleges and hospitals, see Mark Harrison, ‘Was There an Oriental Renaissance in Medicine? The Evidence of the Nineteenth-Century Medical Press’, Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, 233–53 eds. David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 237–8.
For a discussion on the earlier transformation in the field of medicine, health and medical practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Christopher Lawrence, Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1700–1920 (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. chapter 2.
David C. Potter, Government in Rural India. An Introduction to Contemporary District Administration (London: London School of Economics & Political Science; G. Bell & Sons, 1964), 5.
J. M. Bourne, ‘The East India Company’s Military Seminary, Addiscombe, 1809–1858’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 57 (1979), 207.
Anil Seal analyses the implications of the continued move toward more formal bureaucratic and administrative centralisation and training in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), esp. 1–24.
The entrance examination for the college progressively grew more difficult, to the point at which, during the 1830s, a prospective student was required to prove his knowledge not only of the Gospels, but be able to translate portions of Homer, Herodotus and Sophocles, as well as a number of Latin authors includ-ing Cicero, Tacitus and Virgil. See the 1838 East India Register and Directory, cited in H. M. Stephens, ‘The East India College at Haileybury’, Colonial Civil Service. The Selection and Training of Colonial Officials in England, Holland, and France … With an Account of the East India College at Haileybury, 1806–1857, 233–346 ed. Abbott Lawrence Lowell (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 287.
John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian: The Lively Narrative of a Victorian District Officer (London: Eland, 1984), 63–4.
Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Macdonald, Surgeons Twoe and a Barber. Being Some Account of the Life and Work of the Indian Medical Service, 1600–1947 (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1950), 109.
C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire: The New Cambridge Histoty of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 98.
Agency houses served a number of financial intermediary roles, for exam-ple, they acted as bankers for the European community in India and agents investing on behalf of European companies. By the early nineteenth cen-tury, a small number of agency houses had monopolised large sections of the Indian economy, disrupting and displacing indigenous trade networks. For more on the financial collapse of the 1820s, see Amales Tripathi, Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency, 1793–1833 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1979), 170.
C. H. Philips, ed. The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, Governor-General of India 1828–1835 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), xvi.
Frederick Corbyn, ‘Medical College — Defects in its Constitution’, The India Journal of Medical and Physical Science 1, 4 (1836), 187.
While late eighteenth and early nineteenth century descriptions of Indian practitioners refer to the men as ‘doctors’, by the 1830s, this term was replaced with less senior titles. This is not to suggest that these practition-ers were any less experienced than their European counterparts. For more recent studies of South Asian practitioners of ‘western’ medicine see Projit Bihari Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine (London: Anthem, 2009);
Mridula Ramanna, Western Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Bombay (London: Sangam, 2002).
Poonam Bala, Medicine and Medical Policies in India: Social and Historical Perspectives (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 74.
Pamela Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 160.
For detailed examination of the development of Victorian racial theories, see Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987);
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, ‘On the Natural Varieties of Mankind’, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, ed. Thomas Bendyshe (Boston: Milford House, 1865), 101.
James Johnson, following his years as an apprentice and apothecary, began his career as a surgeon’s mate (and later surgeon) in the navy. As such, he accompanied expeditions to Newfoundland, Gibraltar, Egypt and India (among other points). His first work on India, The Oriental Voyager, was published in 1807. He would go on to serve as both editor of the influential Medico-Chirurgical Review and physician to the William IV. For his early India observations, see James Johnson, The Oriental Voyager; or, Descriptive Sketches and Cursory Remarks, on a Voyage to India and China … in the years 1803–4–5–6 (London: James Asperne, 1807).
Mark Harrison, “‘The Tender Frame of Man”: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, 1 (1996), 79.
Benjamin Mosely, quoted in James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the Climate of India, on European Constitutions (London: Stockdale, 1813), 477. Emphasis in original.
Robert John Thornton, The Medical Guardian of Youth; or, A Popular Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of the Venereal Disease, so that Every Patient May Act for Himsel f Containing the Most Approved Practice, and the Latest Discoveries in This Branch of Medicine (London: n.p., 1816), 16.
In an interesting twist, John Helfer, writing of the people of Tenasserim, noted of the offspring of Burmese women and European men that, ‘We have not yet any proof how children by English fathers and Burmese mothers will turn out when grown up, the intercourse between the two nations having subsisted but 14 years; if we however may judge from what the children promise at present, we should be inclined to anticipate that they will be superior to the progeny of Europeans by Indian women’. John William Helfer, ‘Third Report on Tenasserim — the surrounding Nations, — Inhabitants, Natives and Foreigners, — Character, Morals and Religion’, Journal of the Asiatic Society VIII (1839), 1000.
O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past, 1784–1838 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 39.
Kapil Raj, ‘The Historical Anatomy of a Contact Zone: Calcutta in the Eighteenth Century’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 48, 1(2011), 73.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India’, The Journal of British Studies 40, 4 (2001), 491.
James Annesley, Sketches of the Most Prevalent Diseases of India, Comprising a Treatise on Epidemic Cholera of the East (London: n.p., 1825).
Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 2005).
David Arnold, ‘Race, Place and Bodily Difference in Early Nineteenth-Century India’, Historical Research 77, 196 (2004), 257.
Brian Houghton Hodgson, ‘Tibetan Type of Mankind’, Journal of the Asiatic Society XVII, 2 (1848), 222. A monograph which followed on the ‘aborigines’ of India (the preface of which was re-printed in the Journal of the Asiatic Society in 1849), assured readers that India could be clearly divided into two ethnic groups — the more ‘advanced’ Aryan, or ‘immigrant’ group and the ‘Tamulian’, or ‘aboriginal’ group. This latter group, Hodgson proclaimed, was one which was, ‘… never distinguished by mental culture’. Brian Houghton Hodgson, ’A Brief Note on Indian Ethnology’, Journal of the Asiatic Society 18 (1849).
Brian Houghton Hodgson, ‘On the Kocch, Bodo, and Dhimal Tribes’, Miscellaneous Essays Relating to Indian Subjects (London: Trubner & Co, 1880), 150.
James Ranald Martin, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, Including Practical Observations on the Nature and Treatment of the Diseases of Europeans on Their Return from Tropical Climates (London: Churchill, 1856), 139.
See, for example, W. Falconer, Remarks on the Influence of Climate, Situation, Nature of Country, Population, Nature of Food, and Way of Life, on the Disposition and Temper, Manners and Behaviour, Intellects, Laws and Customs, Forms of Government, and Religion, of Mankind (London: C. Dilly, 1781), v.
C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17–18.
For a more detailed examination of Ayurvedic theories, see Francis Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Dr Archibald Shanks, ‘Report of H.M. 55th Foot’, The Madras Quarterly Medical Journal 1, 2 (1839), 243.
George Ballingall, A Probationary Essay on Syphilis: Submitted to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Balfour and Clarke, 1820), 2.
G. A. Cowper, ‘Identity of Syphilis and Gonorrhoea’, Calcutta Medical and Physical Society Quarterly Journal, 2 (1837), 207.
John Clark, ‘Report on Syphilis in HM 13th Light Dragoons’, The Madras Quarterly Medical Journal 1, 2 (1839), 384.
Benjamin Travers, Observations on the Pathology of Venereal Affections (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 7.
Frederic Carpenter Skey, A Practical Treatise on the Venereal Disease. Founded on Six Lectures on that Subject, Delivered in the Session of 1838–1839, at the Aldersgate School of Medicine. With Plates (London: John Churchill, 1840), 4.
John Murray, ‘Quarterly Reports on the Health of Her Majesty’s Troops in the Madras Command for 1838, by the Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals’, The Madras Quarterly Medical Journal 1, 2 (1839), 36.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Erica Wald
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wald, E. (2014). Medicine and Disease in the ‘Age of Reform’. In: Vice in the Barracks. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270993_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270993_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44451-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-27099-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)