Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India

Nandini Bhattacharya022801753X, 9780228017530

At present India is a leading producer, distributor, and consumer of generic medicines globally. Disparate Remedies traces the genealogy of this development and examines the public cultures of medicine in the country between 1870 and 1960.The book begins by discussing the expansion of medical consumerism in late nineteenth-century India when British-owned firms extended their sales into remote towns. As a result, laboratory-produced drugs competed with traditional remedies through side-by-side production of Western and Indian drugs by pharmaceutical companies. The emergent middle classes, the creation of a public sphere, and nationalist politics transformed the medical culture of modern India and generated conflict between Western and Indigenous medical systems and their practitioners. Nandini Bhattacharya demonstrates that these disparate therapies were sustained through the tropes of purity or adulteration, potency or lack of it, and epistemic heritage, even when their material configuration often differed little.Uniquely engaging with the cultures of both consumption and production in the country, Disparate Remedies follows the evolution of medicine in colonial India as it confronted Indian modernity and changing public attitudes surrounding health and drugs.

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Table of contents :
Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India
Cover
Half Title Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India
The Public in Modern India
The Public Spheres of Medicine
State Medicine in Colonial India
Scientific Medicine and the Public in Colonial India
Disparate Remedies
1 The Colonial Medicine Chest
The Colonial Medicine Chest
The Medical Market in Colonial India
‘European’ Drug Houses: Expanding the Medical Market
Conclusion: New Markets in British India
2 The Bazaar and the Indigenous Pharmaceuticals Industry
The ‘Bazaar Market’
Swadeshi Nationalism and the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works
Alembic Chemical Works and Indigenous Enterprise
Indigenous Drugs Manufacture and ‘English’ Medicines
Conclusion: The Pharmacy and the Bazaar
3 For a Pharmacopeia for India
Bazaar Drugs and the Indian Materia Medica
The Many Pharmacopeias of India
Towards the Definitive Pharmacopeia
Impurity and the Problem of Standardization
The Impossibility of an Indian Pharmacopeia
Conclusion
4 The Promises and Forfeiture of Import Substitution
The Government Medical Store and the Problem of Substitution
The Expansion and the Limits of the GMS
Medicines and the Military-Commercial Enterprise
The War and the Search for Substitutes: Local Production with Indigenous Drugs
Medical Discourse and Local Drugs for Local Treatments
The GMS and the Cultivation of Substitute Medical Drugs: Digitalis
Conclusion: The Forfeiture of the Promise of Import Substitution
5 Adulteration and the Medical Market
The Ambiguities of Adulteration
Adulteration and Disparate Dispensing
Legislating Adulteration
The Long Half-life of the DEC Report
6 Disparate Dispensing: Pharmacy in the Eclectic Market
The Compounder and the ‘Independent Medical Practitioner’
Prescriptions and Proprietaries: From Compounders to Pharmacists?
Conclusion: The Compounder and the Fluid Medical Market
7 Drugs for the Nation
Postcolonial Conundrums: Self-Sufficiency and the Biomedicine Gap
The War and the Pharmaceutical Industry
The Marginalisation of Botanical and Mineral Drugs
Self-Sufficiency and the Nation-State
Indigenous Medicine in Independent India
Conclusion
Medical Cultures in Modern India
Medical Pluralism and the Global South
Medical Cultures in Modern India
Notes
Bibliography
Unpublished Records
Periodicals
Official Reports
Published Books and Articles
Unpublished Thesis
Index