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Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 185-1914, by Mark Harrison; pp. xviii + 324. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, L45.00, L19.95 paper, $69.95, $29.95 paper.
In the Americas, imported disease devastated indigenous communities. In Asia or Africa, however, Europeans found themselves overwhelmed by new and mysterious plagues. The Portuguese in the 1560s thus maintained large medical establishment in outposts such as Goa. English merchants similarly carried surgeons and apothecaries with them to India in the seventeenth century, while the East India Company in 1763 sought to secure its new conquests with the formal institution of a "Bengal Medical Service." Territory, however, proved easier to control than disease, and a century later, in the somber aftermath of the Mutiny, the Crown's commissioners estimated that it lost annually sixty-nine out of every 1,000 troops to local contagion. In order to secure its soldiers and civilians, rather than to aid Indians, the Raj after 1859 made public health an administrative priority.
In Public Health in British India, Mark Harrison surveys this Victorian attempt at the "sanitary government" of India through eight exploratory essays. The analytical core...