Healing in an Opiated Empire: Opium and Medicine in South Asia, 1893-1895.
Kola, Tara.
2019
-
This thesis analyzes how opium was contested, prescribed, and used as a medicine in South Asia in the final decade of the nineteenth-century. In response to public pressure to prohibit opium in India and abolish the opium trade with China, the British Parliament approved the formation of a Royal Commission on Opium in 1893. From 1893-1895, the Royal Commission was tasked with investigating whether ... read moreopium should be prohibited in colonial India except for medical use. The Commission produced a seven-volume report including over 2,500 pages of interviews, correspondence, surveys, and statements on opium in India. This study uses the Commission's report to look at what opium as a medical substance meant for those demanding its restriction to medical use, for the different kinds of medical practitioners who treated with opium, and for the different bodies that ingested opium as a medicine. It also positions the author's site of writing, Tufts University, within this history. Ultimately, examining opium as a medicine in this period reveals debates around citizenship, concerns about professionalization, and therapeutic practices in South Asia that challenge distinctions between "Indian" and "British" medicine, as well as a number of other categories of difference.
Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2019.
Submitted to the Dept. of History.
Advisors: Ayesha Jalal, and Sarah Pinto.
Keyword: South Asian studies.read less - ID:
- 5x21tv32z
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
