This book analyses the diverse facets of the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. It incorporates a unique set of themes such as public health and medical institutions. Based on inter-disciplinary research, the book offers valuable contributions to topics that have recently received increased scholarly attention, including the use of opiates and the role of advertising in driving medical markets. Contributors are both established and emerging scholars in the field. The book thus will be of interest to scholars of history, especially the history of medicine and the history of colonialism/imperialism, sociology, cultural theory, and South Asian Studies.

Biswamoy Pati is Reader in the Department of History at Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University, India. His research interests focus on colonial Indian social history and recent publications include an edited book, The Nature of 1857 (2007), and a book co-edited with Waltraud Ernst entitled India's Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism (2007).

Mark Harrison is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Oxford University. His publications include Public Health in British India (1994), Climates and Constitutions (1999) and a co-edited book with Biswamoy Pati, Health, Medicine and Empire (2001).

1. Ranald Martin's Medical Topography [1837]: The Emergence of Public Health in Calcutta Partho Datta 2. The Haj Pilgrimage and Issues of Health Saurabh Mishra 3. Subordinate Negotiations: The Indigenous Staff, Colonial State and Public Health Amna Khalid 4. Plague, Quarantine and Empire: British-Indian Sanitary Strategies in Central Asia, 1897-1907 Sanchari Dutta 5. Medical Research and Control of Disease: Kala-azar in British India Achintya Kumar Dutta 6. The Leprosy Patient and Society: Colonial Orissa, 1870s-1940s Chandi P. Nanda and Biswamoy Pati 7. Medical and Colonial Power: The Case of the Mentally Ill in Nineteenth Century Bengal Waltraud Ernst 8. Prejudices Clung to by the Natives: Ethnicity in the Indian Army and Hospitals for Sepoys, c.1870s-90s Samiksha Sehrawat 9. Racial Pathologies: Morbid Anatomy in British India, 1770-1850 Mark Harrison 10. Pharmacology, Indigenous Knowledge, Nationalism: Few Words from the Epitaph of Subaltern Science Projit B. Mukharji 11. Creating a Medical Consumer: An Analytical Study of Advertisements Madhuri Sharma 12. Opium as a Household Remedy in Nineteenth Century Western India? Amar Farooqui