CCB213 | A Clean Bill of Heath: A Medico-Legal History

What does it mean to be healthy? What is the politics behind hygiene? How does race feature in the medical science? Can medicine have a social history? Why are criminals considered unclean in cultural perception? Can we have an original ‘Indian’ medicine? These are some of the questions that this course will dwell upon. Reaching across the histories of empire, race, legality, gender and advertising this course will trace the development of the medical field as the technology of rule.

Rather than locating it within the ‘objective’ nature of medical sciences, this course will offer an insight into the discursive production of medical knowledge. It was a knowledge that was predicated on competing political rationalities and needs of colonial governance. Coursing through it will be how law mediated the universal claims of medical science and the very specific colonial construction of them. Alongside, it will locate how the intervention of commerce enabled to form new criminalities, particularly white-collar criminals, as a byproduct of development of the medical field in India. It will further develop on the shifts within medical field—from cure to investigative modality to a form of control through public health and the market of medical products.