‘A Small History of Health’ by Prof. Susie Tharu,

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

cordially invites you to a Public Lecture

(in the ‘Rethinking History’ series)

at 3.00 pm on Friday, 13 September, 2013

in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building

on

‘A Small History of Health’

by

Prof. Susie Tharu,

The English and Foreign Languages University,

Hyderabad.

Abstract:

Sequentialist narratives that assume “health” to be an enduring and self-evident concept, tell the story of the development of medicine as a science, and point to the improvement of health in modern societies.  The speaker does not want, here, to take issue with either of these claims.  Her interest here lies in pointing to what is obscured by this way of telling the story, as the development of a science concerned with healing the sick or promoti8ng individual well-being.  What is obscured is the field or the framework (in the arts we speak of frames) in which scientific medicine and health emerged and developed.  Both health and medicine take shape/form in the field of statecraft associated with modern government.  The size, strength and health of a population were of key import in the defense of territory as well as in the effective exploitation of resources. Information gathering, statistical ideas and calculations, the very idea of risk (and insurance) are formed in this crucible. In India the C19 emergence of modern medicine is focused on governmental concerns such as the control of epidemics, the regulation of the sexual life of the army, sanitation, water supply and salubriousness in cantonments. A secondary task was the discrediting and displacement of competing medicinal services. In brief, health, which today masquerades as a feature of individual well-being, is in fact a concept that is related to territories and populations and renders account to the state.  As we who are living through times when universal health insurance is being experimented with by many state governments, know, while welfare medicine does introduce a new idea of health as a right, it also hugely expands the scope of governmental health care and of the markets that attach to it.  Today it is this market, a market that feeds on the scope of health as a governmental form, that determines the nature of medicine and health as science, as industry and as user-experience. If in the early and mid years of this century, wave upon wave of public health initiatives—malaria eradication, various vaccines, population control,  polio, TB control programmes—hit the common people of this country, but left its elite largely untouched; today the elite have also been swept up in the wave.

Speaker:

Prof. Susie Tharu studied in Makerere University, Uganda and Somerville College, Oxford.  She has taught in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur, and since 1973 in EFLU, Hyderabad.  She is currently Eminent Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.   She is also a founder member of Stree Shakti Sanghatana, Anveshi  Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad and a member of the erstwhile Subaltern Studies Collective.   Her teaching and research interests are in feminism and other issues of minority, aesthetics in the literary and visual arts and the culture of medicine in India.  She has given talks at and taught in universities across India and other parts of the world, and published six books including, in the early 1990s, the well-known two-volume anthology, Women Writing in India.  Her most recent publications are Towards a Critical Medical Practice: Dilemmas of Medical Culture Today(with Anand Zacaraiah and R. Srivatsan) 2009, No Alphabet in Sight, 2011, and Steel Nibs are Sprouting2013,  Dossiers of New Dalit Writing from South India  (with K. Satyanarayana).