Health, medicine and empire: perspectives on colonial India

without an ascertainable and localizable lesion. The historically familiar image of young Sigmund Freud's mentor, Theodor Meynert, contemptuously dismissing such cases as "mere hysteria" at the Vienna Medical School captures this belief. Yet, from his research, Hodgkiss finds that in point of fact a rich, varied, and clinically astute body of observation and theorization about this phenomenon runs through western medicine during the years 1800-1914. Based on an abundance of excerpted passages from medical-historical texts, I came away thoroughly convinced of Hodgkiss's counter-reading. (I suspect, furthermore, that the earlier historical view traces to psychoanalyst-historians of the mid-twentieth century who wished to present a picture of crude and unrelieved organicism in the mental sciences in order to heighten the apparent originality of Freud's work). A risk of a strict clinical and intellectual history of medical ideas is the disembodiment of the subject, and Hodgkiss, it should be acknowledged, is not immune from this danger. Particularly after the brilliant precedent of Elaine Scarry's The body in pain (1985), I regret that the author says so little about the cultural, experiential, and, finally, existential aspects of human pain. I would also like to have found a greater social, cultural, and religious contextualization of pain, which, after all, is not a uniform experience but rather is interpreted by individuals, classes, genders, and religions according to very different cosmologies of suffering. But these matters would perhaps require a different sort of book altogether. Andrew Hodgkiss's lucid, readable, and perceptive study provides an exemplary account of the background to one of the most rapidly expanding clinical and diagnostic concepts in contemporary medicine. As the editors remark in introducing this collection of essays, ten years ago only a handful of scholars worked on imperialism and medicine in India, but since then disease and medicine have become prominent features of Indian historical scholarship. While sharing no obvious problematic, the essays are presented as "fresh and innovative" contributions to the field, pointing the way to "a major reappraisal, not only of the relationship between medicine and imperialism, but of the nature of imperialism itself". The editors identify two main historical contributions: firstly, the ways in which Indians co-opted imperial medicine and adapted it to their own requirements, and, secondly, the complexity of relations between colonizers and colonized and the diversity of the colonial impact on India. The essays certainly represent very diverse approaches. Mark Harrison gives a schematic overview …