Hindu Wombs, Muslim Progeny: The Numbers Game and Shifting Debates on Widow Remarriage in Uttar Pradesh, 1890s-1930s (original) (raw)
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Patriarchy and Medicine: A Woman Medical Missionary in the Colonial Punjab
Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 2022
My paper seeks to explore the wide-ranging influence of institutionalized patriarchy and its ideology in constructing and strengthening gendered notions of science particularly medicine in Britain, Europe and United States especially during the First and Second World Wars. Even after the end of these wars and return of peace, women continued to be relegated to the domestic arena despite their conspicuous medical roles. Dubbed as sexualized bodies with inferior intellectual abilities, they continued to be denied admission in medical colleges and jobs. My argument shall be illustrated with examples from women's struggles for medical education in the imperialist countries and the colonized countries namely India. The processes were complex and different in each terrain depending upon the dynamics of cultural and nationalist forces. In the course of discussion, debates regarding women's struggle for medical education and for equal status as full-fledged missionaries and professional identity as institution-builders, surgeons and gynecologists shall figure in. It shall include references to the rabid hostility of their male colleagues and students. The story of Christian Medical College in Ludhiana (Punjab, India), founded and nourished by a Baptist missionary, Edith Brown, provides the best example of the tension between misogynist notions of women's intellectual caliber and their success as medical doctors, professional surgeons and administrators during periods of crisis such as wars and massacres during the partition of Punjab (1947). Their success, though partial, in modernizing notions of disease and women's health, has long-term implications for medical traditions in India.
In His Service For Her Health: Women Missionary Doctors in Colonial India
Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences: Journal of The Inter-University Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. XVIII, Number 1, Summer 2021, 2021
Modern notions of gender and sexuality have been defined and asserted in the colonial discourses which portrayed Europe as the masculinist colonizer exercising control over a feminized Orient. Ideas of a hypersexual, unhygienic, and simple-minded oriental subject informed colonial policies on health, taxation, urban and economic planning. In this colonial context, women’s private spaces and their bodies became sites of study, social reform, and philanthropy. This essay studies this intersection and interaction between medicine, gender and colonialism in women’s healthcare provided in the newly emerging women’s hospitals and in the zenanas in the early 20th century. It focuses on the quotidian realities of women’s hospitals in colonial India. This essay also, by employing a feminist reading of personal records of women as doctors, nurses, and patients, seeks to understand how individual medical encounters can be used in writing intimate histories of medicine and in re- conceptualizing women’s spaces as sites of knowledge production.
The Absence of the Female in Medical Discourses of 19th century Bengal
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020
The 19th century also witnessed a plethora of innovations in medicine that led to the rejection of the theory of miasma giving rise to a new perspective on human body and the diseases thereof which facilitated substantial study on tropical medicine and diseases by the imperial administration. Few contemporary novels bear testimony to this advancement of medicine and the advent of natives in the military and civil medical services. The paper, in question, will utilise one such novel that is, Banaphool’s Agniswar as an entrepot to question the absence of women in the evolving 19th century colonial medical discourse as active beneficiaries. It would seek to establish that women suffered worse than their male counterparts as their diseases were considered to be private affairs to be dealt exclusively within the confines of the household. The paper will commence by classifying contemporary females under three heads that is Memsahibs, Bhadramahilas, and the rest followed by studying them ...
Medical careers and health care for indian women: patterns of control
Women's History Review, 1994
In the 1880s reform-minded men and women in Great Britain had joined the missionaries and a number of Indian reformers in demanding that Western medical care be extended to Indian women. The subjects of their concern were high-status Indian women who observed the norms of seclusion. British women, at this time entering the medical profession, supported this initiative because it legitimized their professional goals and promised employment. This paper explores the introduction of medical care for Indian women with reference to the life of Dr Haimavati Sen (c.1867-1932), lady doctor in charge of an exclusively womens hospital in Hughli district of Bengal. The paper explores two issues: the ways in which imperialism, feminism, and racism worked to marginalize Indian women in professional medical roles and the impact of this process upon women as patients and clients.
Women Question and Public Health Administration in Colonial Bengal, 1880s–1940s
Indian Historical Review, 2024
Is it possible for medical practitioners to complete their professional training and pursue their careers without understanding the history of public health? The evolution of public health over time holds significant implications for the appropriate responses to modern-day challenges in public health practice. The article emphasises the changing nature of healthcare practices in the late years of the Raj and draws attention to the growth of public health administration and its impact on women’s health. The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed debates and discussions on disseminating health education among women through different agencies. There was a noticeable growth of voluntary associations devoted to maternal and child health care. Not only the Dufferin Fund but also different philanthropic organisations set up by British elite women and thus closely connected to the colonial state like the Lady Reading Fund, Lady Chelmsford Fund, and so on, became involved in providing professional training for Indian women in medicine (doctors, hospital assistants, midwives, nurses, health visitors, etc.), establishing hospitals and dispensaries dedicated to women and children in the urban and rural areas, organising healthcare activities for them (baby shows and welfare exhibition), among others. The proceedings of these voluntary associations, journals like the Indian Medical Gazette, government reports on the subject, along with the archival documents help to understand how the women’s healthcare issues were addressed by different agencies (colonial state, medical practitioners and philanthropic organisations) through educational and medical interventions between the 1880s and the 1940s
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indianization of the Indian Medical Service became one of the key demands of the emerging nationalist movement. Interestingly, subsequent reaction of the colonial officials and the government to this demand exposed the racial biases and predilections of colonialism. The present paper tends to explore such racial leanings of the cadre of the ‘Indian’ Medical Service having extremely ‘non-Indian’ character and the racial prejudices of the colonial government and its officials despite their claims of liberalism, rationality and enlightenment. When the demand of Indianization of the Indian Medical Service surfaced, the so-called ‘liberal’ British officials resorted to similar ‘primitive’ arguments and concerns viz. safeguarding the ‘prestige’ and ‘honour’ of the English women, etc. to thrash such demands of Indianization of medical services in India. Nonetheless, from 1890s onwards the demand for opening superior positions for Indians in the colonial medical administration gained tide and the colonial government had to keep responding to such demands revealing the steps taken in this direction. However, the infamous case of Dr. Houlton of the Women Medical Service (WMS) which took place in mid-1930s shows that the colonial government was never serious in its efforts towards the Indianization of the medical services in India. Whatever compositional changes (in racial terms) occurred at the upper echelons of the medical administration was mostly due to non-availability of the European candidates and was nowhere a consequence of the conscious effort on the part of the government.
Women p hysicians as Vital intermediaries in colonial Bombay
2008
The pivot around which the improvement of maternal health revolved was the Indian woman doctor and her growing presence from the 1900s was to be seen at hospitals and welfare centres in the Bombay presidency, promoting knowledge of more hygienic birthing methods and safe infant care. These women physicians, graduates of the first five decades of the Bombay University were not only influential in coping with the serious public health challenge of maternal mortality, their excellent standard of professional skills was much appreciated and became a role model for the younger generation of women doctors.