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Diabetes in the tropics: race, place and class in India, 1880-1965

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Arnold, David. (2009) Diabetes in the tropics: race, place and class in India, 1880-1965. Social History of Medicine, Vol.22 (No.2). pp. 245-261. ISSN 0951-631X

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkp005

Abstract

A disease predominantly of India's urban middle class and increasingly common in modern India, diabetes attracted little state medical attention either before or in the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947. It did, however, give rise to an extensive medical literature, generated by both Indian and British doctors, pathologists and medical researchers, who understood the disease not just in terms of class susceptibility and the consequences of colonial modernity, but also in relation to racial and environmental characteristics. The rise of 'tropical diabetes' in India thus reflected and exemplified a wider trend towards the racialisation and tropicalisation of Indian medical thought. Despite the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, prophylaxis and treatment of the disease in India suggested a continuing belief in a culturally distinctive approach to the disease.

Item Type:

Journal Article

Subjects:

Q Science

Divisions:

Faculty of Arts > History

Journal or Publication Title:

Social History of Medicine

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

ISSN:

0951-631X