Imperial wards: South Asian women doctors and the networking of medical institutions in the late-Victorian British Empire
Vitale, Stephen
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124710
Description
Title
Imperial wards: South Asian women doctors and the networking of medical institutions in the late-Victorian British Empire
Author(s)
Vitale, Stephen
Issue Date
2024-04-26
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Burton, Antoinette
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Burton, Antoinette
Committee Member(s)
Rabin, Dana
Hogarth, Rana
van der Spuy, Patricia
Department of Study
History
Discipline
History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
medicine
women doctors
Britain
empire
race
gender
mobility.
Abstract
Imperial Wards explores the peripatetic careers of first-generation South Asian women doctors as they moved within and between medical schools and hospitals across colonial India and the UK. In so doing, it presents a new spatial history of women’s medicine in the British empire, one that moves past the London and Calcutta binary which have served as stand-ins for ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’ in the historiography. Conversely, this dissertation traces structural connections through the medical institutions of Madras, Edinburgh, and Bombay, while searching for the experiences of South Asian women doctors therein. In particular, it centers the career of one totally consequential but hitherto overlooked physician, Annie Wardlaw Jagannadham, who was the first non-white woman to study and practice medicine in British history. Through a variegated empirical base — which includes colonial government proceedings, hospital records, missionary records, and the patient case files of Jagannadham herself — collected from multiple archival sites in Edinburgh, London, Mumbai, and Chennai, the project uses Jagannadham as a mobile vantage point to capture the consequences of structural discrimination in the imperial medical profession. Ultimately, such inquiries pinpoint the racism and sexism of colonial medicine in the late-Victorian era by re-mapping the institutionalization of India’s medical women along a transnational grid.
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