ABSTRACT

Opposition to indigenous medical systems3 from the advocates of the medical tradition originating in Europe was nothing new; it was a by-product of the rapid developments within Western medicine which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had transformed it into what we now call biomedicine.4 Variously referred to in British India as ‘allopathy’, the ‘modern’, ‘English’ or ‘Western system of medicine’, we will use the term ‘biomedicine’ throughout the text. This medical transformation brought different theoretical and practical aspects to the fore, exemplified, for instance, by the shift from a miasmatic to a germ-based theory of disease causation. In consequence the points of contact and contention between the medical systems were altered and advocates of biomedicine shifted the battlelines as to what constituted a ‘proper’ medical system on to the territory of a domain called ‘science’.5