Islam and healing : loss and recovery of an Indo-Muslim medical tradition, 1600-1900 / Seema Alavi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alavi, Seema.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medicine, Arab--India--History.

Medicine, Arab.

Medicine, Greek and Roman--India--History.

Medicine, Greek and Roman.

Medicine--India--History.

Medicine.

History.

India.

Medicine, Unani--history.

History, Modern 1601-.

Islam--history.

Religion and Medicine.

Medical Subjects:

Medicine, Unani--history.

India.

History, Modern 1601-.

Islam--history.

Religion and Medicine.

Physical Description:

xiii, 384 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Summary:

This book shows the extent of an Islamic healing traditions' interaction with Indian society and politics as these evolved and flourished in tandem from 1600 to 1900. Drawing on critical Persian texts for the pre-colonial phase, Alavi additionally moves beyond the standard colonial archive to deploy hitherto unused Urdu texts, pamphlets, local newspapers, and private family records. The result is a substantial revision of the existing historiography of Indian Islam's encounter with Western medicine.

Without diminishing the importance of the state, she demonstrates how an in-house struggle for hegemony can be as potent as external power during the processes that define medical, social, and national modernity. Within the contemporary world, where West-dominant globalization frequently demonizes both Islam and cultural alternatives, the implications of this book - centred as it is on the struggle to preserve a specific culture of healing - are profound. A pioneering work on the social and medical history of Indian Islam, this book will interest all historians, students of Islam's interaction with the West, alternative modernities, and the ancient as well as contemporary struggle of the local with the global.

Contents:

Indo-Muslim medicine : Unani in pre-modern India

Encounter with the West : the English East India Company

The practice of medicine : public welfare

Dispensaries and shifakhaanas in early-nineteenth-century India

Urdu medical texts in the late nineteenth century

Argumentative hakims : debates in the Oudh Akhbar

From Jhawain-tola to Takmil-ut-Tibb, Lucknow.

Notes:

"South Asian edition first published 2007 by Permanent Black"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [353]-368) and index.

ISBN:

0780239554382

0230554385

9780230554382

OCLC:

218190968

Online:

Publisher description