ABSTRACT
To begin with, my research aimed to provide a reinterpretation of the general climate of medical and popular thought about the nursing of European infants by memsahibs and dais in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘tropical’ India. Medical advice on breastfeeding also provided novel entry points into colonial and indigenous representations of ‘Indian mothers’ and their childrearing practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial Calcutta. An in-depth study of medical advice on child marriage and ‘premature maternity’ also revealed the urgent need doctors felt at the time to differentiate between the bodily makeup of the girl child and woman. It also investigated ‘clean midwifery’/‘dirty midwifery’, ‘mothercraft’ and feeding by the clock, wet nursing, artificial feeding of infants, and adulteration of foodstuffs amidst soaring infant morbidity and mortality rates.
