Another History of Smallpox
Harish Naraindas
This lecture explores the heterodox history of smallpox: a history of its therapeutics and cure and not only a history of prevention or of public health symbolised by variolation and vaccination. I am interested, to put it rather plainly, in how people who contracted smallpox in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cured themselves. While variolation and vaccination inaugurate a new form of prophylaxis and the notion of public health, it does not tell us the story of individual care and cure. Nor are we privy to forms of dissent: not merely as opposition to vaccination but through other forms of healing and cure based on other theories.
Harish Naraindas is Assistant Professor and full time faculty at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa. He has been a visiting fellow in various academic institutions, including the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine in London; the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (MSH) Paris, and the University of Bristol. His research interest spans a number of areas: the history of medicine, and a comparative history and ethnography of orthodox and heterodox medicine in the East and the West. His current work revolves around various facets of Ayurveda, bioterrorism, a comparative study of birthing practices in India and the US, and the question of equity in relief post-tsunami in Sri Lanka. He has published extensively in leading journals on tropical medicine, smallpox or Ayurveda.
(Personal publications)
naraindas_care.pdf — Harish Naraindas, Care, welfare, and treason: The advent of vaccination in the 19th century, Contributions to Indian sociology, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1998, pp. 67-96.
naraindas_crisis.pdf — Harish Naraindas, Crisis, charisma and triage: Extirpating the pox, Indian Economic & Social History Review, Vol. 40, No. 4, 2003, pp. 425-457.
Harish Naraindas, Preparing for the Pox: A Theory of Smallpox in Bengal and Britain, Asian Journal of Social Science, Volume 31, Number 2, june 2003.
This essay is to be conceived in two parts. The first part is an exegesis of an eighteenth-century tract on the practice of smallpox inoculation in Bengal written by a Scottish medic. Cited repeatedly in the contemporary history and anthropology of smallpox in India, it has been invariably used to highlight the technique of inoculation in eighteenth-century India. Caught in disciplinary cleaving between anthropology and history, its original import has not been addressed. The exegesis in restoring the text to its intended import, argues that it offers a theory of smallpox, and in this theory the technique of inoculation is a moment in larger therapeutics. The latter-day privileging of this moment has resulted in seeing the nineteenth-century as a standoff between variolation (smallpox inoculation) and vaccination. The exegesis, however, recasts this as a passage from a therapeutics to a pure prophylactics that caccination represents. Having restored what I think is the central concern of the essay, I then begin to ask whether the essay is actually about the manner of inoculating for the smallpox in Bengal as Holwell says it is or is it actually about its practice in Britain. It is this very restoration, when we locate the essay in 18th century Britain, that allows us, in the latter part of the essay, to see that not only is the theoretical articulation “induced” by his audience, but also every detail of the description of the practice, which has hitherto been seen as a description determined by his experience in India, is equally induced and determined by his location in Britain. While this could lead me to argue that Holwell’s essay has nothing to do with India, I suggest that what the text effects, if not represents, is a kind of translation: one that is both possible and enabled by the fact that the kind of medical theory and practice that underlies disease and its cure is similar - not identical - in India and Britain.
naraindas_poisons.pdf — Harish Naraindas, Poisons, putrescence and the weather: A genealogy of the advent of Tropical Medicine, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 1, 1996, pp. 1-35.
naraindas_preparing_for_pox.pdf — Harish Naraindas, Preparing for the pox: A theory of smallpox in Bengal and Britain, Asian Journal of Social Science, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2003, pp. 304-339.
naraindas_spineless_babies.pdf — Harish Naraindas, Of spineless babies and folic acid: Evidence and efficacy in biomedicine and ayurvedic medicine, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 62, Issue 11, June 2006, pp. 2658-2669.