Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury opinions the quick story anthology Medical Maladies: Tales of Illness and Treatment from Indian Languages edited by Haris Qadeer (Nioyogi Books, 2022) and displays on India’s place throughout the postcolonial medical humanities.
Whereas the Medical Humanities as a self-discipline and its subsequent enlargement into the broader space of Well being Humanities has made vital interventions in biomedical apply and wider tradition in current a long time, it appears the sector is but to see an equal flourish in idea and apply in India. With its multi-lingual and multi-cultural panorama, India as a rustic gives intensive alternatives for paradigmatic shifts, enlargement of information bases and dialogues round international inequalities in healthcare. On this context, the quick story anthology Medical Maladies (2022) presents a superb and mandatory gateway to not solely provoke conversations in analysis subjects central to Medical Humanities typically, but in addition to boost and doubtlessly reply questions exploring the precise, regionally grounded meanings of the self-discipline in India.
The gathering brings collectively a complete of 19 quick tales translated from a variety of regional Indian languages which incorporates picks from each canonical in addition to lesser-known writers from throughout the nation. Though, classifying the tales out there on this assortment into well-defined thematic classes could be an understatement of the complexity that every particular person story gives, figuring out some broad areas of focus could also be useful in framing the general contribution it makes to the understanding of well being, sickness and incapacity in India. Thus, the tales could also be learn in keeping with the next thematic considerations:
- 1- Epidemics and The Collective Expertise of Sickness
- 2- Ethics of Medical Follow
- 3- Healthcare and Heterotopias
- 4- Intersectionality and Socio-Financial Realities
- 5- The Range of Medical Cultures in India
Epidemics and The Collective Expertise of Sickness
The primary class of tales contains three items from the gathering, every of which foregrounds a special side of how epidemics are skilled and handled by affected populations. Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Quarantine” paints a grim image of the quarantine system with a strong modern resonance. The story, initially written in 1939, proves a timeless tackle healthcare practices in India by asking questions related even within the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It poses vital questions on care, danger and selfless service voiced via the musings of a sanitary employee on the quarantine centre, who comes to appreciate that extra deaths have occurred due to isolation and quarantine than due to the illness itself. Singh Bedi’s narrative exposes the neglect, loneliness and hopelessness that sufferers expertise as they’re separated from household and dissolves meta-narratives that glorify the quarantine system, largely perpetuated by state-led apparatuses. The inclusion of this historic exploration of the emotional impression of quarantine methods in Medical Maladies presents a vital parallel to modern criticisms of using comparable healthcare measures through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shankar Raina’s “Whose Flip Now?’ exploring the cholera epidemic in Kashmir provokes equally politicised questions concerning the emotional impression of quarantine measures on populations. This story is especially harrowing in the best way it depicts sufferers ready on the basic hospital ward for both restoration or demise. The shadow of demise looms massive even because the muti-patient chamber turns into a microcosm of on a regular basis human life full of affection and goals. “The Plague-Witch” by ‘Grasp’ Bhagwandas, nonetheless, takes a singular flip by connecting the issue of sickness to the apply of witch-hunting, nonetheless prevalent in lots of distant and rural areas (significantly Northern and Central components) of Indian states. Witch-hunting, on this context, refers back to the framing and subsequent execution of normally older and single girls who’re suspected of getting supernatural powers and malicious intentions. The explanations for such framing might vary from ignorance and superstition to private grudges however the framed people are virtually at all times tortured to demise. Bhagwandas’ story, subsequently, brings the issues of superstition, illiteracy and lack of information among the many folks to the fore by telling the story of how even plagues could also be blamed on girls in a staunchly patriarchal society. Whereas these points have garnered appreciable curiosity from governing our bodies, these nonetheless require a extra rigorous socio-cultural and financial engagement for his or her answer.
Ethics of Medical Follow
There are three tales included in Medical Maladies which discover the ethics of medical apply, commenting significantly on how medical care has been commercialised in India to turn into a mechanically carried out ‘service’ dominated by the ‘remedy ideology’ (Bhat 1996, Clare 2017). “The Surgeon” by Sheeba E.Okay. for example, highlights the immorality of the apply whereby hospitals maintain on to sufferers until their final breath to extract most financial income. Likewise, “Mantra” by Prem Chand and “The Closing Check” by Amar productively look at the idea of the “medical gaze” propounded by Michel Foucault ([1963] 2003), whereby sufferers are become scripts of biomedical data and their our bodies into overwritten narratives of experiments, drug trials and coverings.
Healthcare and Heterotopias
Nevertheless, the work of Medical Humanities can now not restrict itself to the critiquing of unethical and dehumanizing practices that characterise the biomedical equipment, however ought to broaden its contours to facilitating productive engagements with affected person narratives past the self-discipline’s “utilitarian bias” (Bleakley 2014, 23) that reduces the humanities to a footnote within the apply of healthcare. This assortment of tales deftly addresses this drawback by together with items that concentrate on structural inequalities, set up an alliance with the work of fields like Incapacity Research and take us into the grass-root terrains of Indian healthcare. Thus, the three tales, particularly, “A Day within the Labour Room” by Jeelani Bano, “Manzoor” by Saadat Hasan Manto and “Day Care” by Zakia Mashhadi are wonderful additions that discover “heterotopic” (Foucault 1997) areas just like the labour room, the ready room and the multi-patient chamber that sufferers and carers must traverse recurrently, the intimacies that develop in these environments and the shared sense of humanity that emerges. Such “heterotopic” areas spotlight the inadequacies of up to date biomedical methods in India, not solely by way of the dearth of infrastructure, unavailability of physicians and lengthy ready hours, but in addition the failure to cater to the emotional wants of sufferers. However, the relationships that develop amongst sufferers that co-habit these areas are fraught with emotions of empathy and camaraderie together with a way of competitors, often disgust or hostility, all of which discover good expression in these tales.
Intersectionality and Socio-Financial Realities
The gathering contains 4 extra tales which additional present debates on intersectionality explored to date by foregrounding the structural inequalities amongst totally different teams of individuals which make sure communities extra weak to sure well being situations and make it tough for them to entry healthcare successfully. These tales touch upon poverty, caste, gender and patriarchy to contextualize the precise issues of sickness and incapacity in India. “Physician Moni” by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay is especially fascinating in that it challenges the stereotype of the physician as purely rational and impassive by introducing a doctor who treats sufferers who’re unable to afford care free of charge in a non-medical method. In truth, the poor untrained ‘quack’ physician’s determine represented by Moni is an actual staple of Indian villages the place hospitals and clinics are scarce and therapy includes lengthy hours of journey to cities. Whereas such docs typically exploit weak teams by offering doubtlessly harmful healthcare, Physician Moni is offered as a beneficiant man who devotes his life to treating the poor and the desolate. “The Longing” by Kartar Singh Duggal and “Narova Kunjarova” by Shirin Shashikant Valavade are vital expositions on feminine foeticide, girls’s abortion rights, bodily autonomy and critiques patriarchal social mores together with dogmatic authorized methods that condemn girls to unethical and unhygienic technique of healthcare. Whereas Rashid Jahan’s piece “Asif Jahan’s Daughter-in-Regulation” posits the hazards of kid marriage and conventional strategies of kid supply, Bhabendra Nath Saikia’s “The Cavern” appropriates the dramatic story of a coronary heart transplant surgical procedure to ruminate on the stigma and discrimination round caste, class and racial distinction.
The Range of Medical Cultures in India
Lastly, in a fiercely postcolonial vein, the remaining set of tales covers the “medical pluralism in India” that has existed within the sub-continent for hundreds of years and served the plenty as alternate options to pathology, prognosis and remedy oriented western/colonial biomedicine (Qadeer 2022, 23). Basant Kumar Satpathy’s “A Main Operation” and Rajshekhar Basu Parshuram’s “A Disaster of Medical Remedy” current stark representations of the failures of recent drugs and switch the dialog in the direction of the usefulness of ethnomedicinal data retained by native communities. These tales argue for the potential and necessity of collaborative efforts amongst conventional indigenous methods of healthcare like Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, homeopathy with trendy biomedicine to yield higher advantages for sufferers. Elsewhere in “The Present of Imaginative and prescient”, Rabindranath Tagore sheds gentle on the tussle between faith and science that always shapes the best way sicknesses are interpreted and handled throughout India. Moreover, two tales, particularly, “The Stranger” by Ashok Vasishth and “Heartless” by Annie Zaidi utilise the genres of romance and speculative fiction to discover the variety of medical cultures in new and revolutionary methods.
Conclusion
As David T. Mitchell notes in his Foreword to Medical Maladies, the work of Medical Humanities wants to beat the myopic imaginative and prescient of healthcare that centres merely on doctor-patient encounters (2022, 10) and switch to social, cultural, political and financial questions that inform experiences of sickness and care. The gathering of tales in Medical Maladies, subsequently, presses the necessity to assume alongside these traces in adapting epistemologies and methodologies from allied disciplines in order that the specificities of native realities are usually not misplaced within the shadow of the worldwide. As corporeal and geographical borders are generally crossed and at different instances reified via the polyphonic narratives, the street to a postcolonial Medical Humanities appears to be taking concrete form on this rewarding assortment.
In regards to the Writer
Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury is a third-year doctoral candidate in English at Cotton College, India. She is pursuing her PhD in dementia narratives on the intersection of Well being Humanities and Incapacity Research. Different areas of her analysis curiosity embrace Victorian Literature, Literatures of the Anthropocene and Japanese Anime and Manga. She is presently engaged on two forthcoming publications with Springer and Lexington Press respectively, and might be discovered on X @Todorokinogf.
References
Bhat, Ramesh. 1996. “Regulating the Personal Well being Care Sector: The Case of the Indian Shopper Safety Act.” Well being Coverage and Planning 11 (3): 265-279.
Bleakley, Alan. 2014. “In direction of a ‘vital medical humanities’”, in Drugs, Well being and the Arts: Approaches to the medical humanities, eds. Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley and Sam Goodman, 17-26.New York: Routledge.
Clare, Eli. 2017. Sensible Imperfection: Grappling with Treatment. Durham: Dukes College Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1963) 2003. The Beginning of The Clinic. London: Routledge.
−. 1997. “Of Different Areas: Utopias and Heterotopias”, in Rethinking Structure: A Reader in Cultural Principle, ed. Neil Leach, 330-36. New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, David T. 2022. Foreword to Medical Maladies: Tales of Illness and Treatment from Indian Languages, ed. Haris Qadeer, 7-12. New Delhi: Niyogi Books.
Qadeer, Haris, ed. 2022. Medical Maladies: Tales of Illness and Treatment from Indian Languages. New Delhi: Niyogi Books.
Qadeer, Haris. 2022. Introduction to Medical Maladies: Tales of Illness and Treatment from Indian Languages, ed. Haris Qadeer, 13-35. New Delhi: Niyogi Books.
