This book seeks to move emphasis away from the over-riding importance given to the state in existing studies of 'western' medicine in India, and locates medical practice within its cultural, social and professional milieus. Based on Bengali doctors writings this book examines how various medical problems, challenges and debates were understood and interpreted within overlapping contexts of social identities and politics on the one hand, and their function within a largely unregulated medical market on the other.

'Nationalizing the Body' revisits the history of 'western' medicine in colonial South Asia through the lives, writings and practice of the numerous Bengali 'daktars' who adopted and practised it. Refusing to see 'western' medicine as an alienated appendage of the colonial state, this book explores how 'western' medicine was vernacularised. It argues that a burgeoning medical market and a medical publishing industry together gave 'daktari' medicine a social identity which did not solely derive from its association with the state. Accessing many of the best-known ideas and episodes of colonial South Asian medical history, it seeks to understand how 'daktari' medicine re-positioned the colonized bodies as nationalized bodies.