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    Treacherous minds, submissive bodies: corporeal technologies and human experimentation in colonial India

    Sengoopta, Chandak (2018) Treacherous minds, submissive bodies: corporeal technologies and human experimentation in colonial India. In: Deb Roy, R. and Attewell, G.N.A. (eds.) Locating the Medical: Explorations in South Asian History. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199486717.

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    Abstract

    Whilst historians have extensively explored how hospitals, asylums or sanitation projects in British India reflected colonial ideas of racial difference, we know rather less about the influence of racial theories and stereotypes on technologies such as fingerprinting, evolved incolonial Bengal as an administrative tool but found applicable across the world, or, at the other extreme, “mesmeric surgery,” discarded in the metropole but experiencing a brief second life in colonial Bengal. Exploring these contrasting projects, both grounded in British theories about the nature of the bodies and minds of “natives,” the chapter suggests that the historiography of colonial medicine needs to expand its scope to include issues related to governmentality, corporeal technologies and knowledge-transfer within and beyond the British Empire.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book Section
    Additional Information: Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
    School: School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy > History, Classics and Archaeology
    Depositing User: Chandak Sengoopta
    Date Deposited: 16 Oct 2017 11:00
    Last Modified: 12 Apr 2022 18:17
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/18415

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