Robert Mayer and the conservation of energy

After an introduction on the role of colonial medicine in India, each of the following essays deals with a particular aspect of the subject. One takes up the role of British doctors in their assigned duty to protect the health of British soldiers on one hand and Indian prisoners on the other. Three deal with particular diseases-smallpox, cholera, and plague-chosen for the political controversy they aroused rather than their importance as a cause of death. A final essay on "health and hegemony" is a Gramscian analysis of the blend of coercion and consent that finally led to a general, if slow, acceptance of Western medicine in India. Each essay has many fascinating insights into the politics of medicine in nineteenth-century India and into the place of Western medicine in any crosscultural setting at that time. In spite of a wealth of detail and the author's deep understanding of Indian politics in the British period, the treatment as a whole is mildly unsatisfying. The crucial problem is its lack of a biological base. Western medicine and Indian medicine alike were trying to intervene in an ecological relationship between pathogens and human beings, but although Arnold cites and quotes liberally from nineteenth-century medical opinion, he does not set that opinion against present biomedical knowledge. Arnold's acknowledged theoretical indebtedness is revealing. He mentions Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said-none of them scientists or historians of science-and he assumes that his readership will be familiar with their work. He writes, for example, that: "Anyone who sets out to try to write a history of the body is inevitably indebted to Michel Foucault". From the perspective of the natural sciences, most biologists who write about the body have never heard of Foucault; and few of those who have would feel much indebted to him. The title itself is a problem; the verb "to colonize" has a biological as well as a political meaning. Vibrio cholerae and variola major certainly colonized Indian bodies in the nineteenth century. It is harder to see the sense in which British medical officers might have done so. "Colonize" and "colonialism" are, indeed, used in several different senses. On p. 112, jails and'Indian military establishments were "were progressively colonized by Western medical and sanitary practices". At another point "colonialism" too becomes an actor in history, as in: "Colonialism used-or attempted to use-the body as a site for the construction of its own authority, legitimacy, and control." (p. 8). Interesting as the book is in its treatment of the politics of medicine, it would have been stronger still if the author had paid more attention to the biology and less to Foucault.