Medicine, Disease and Ecology in Colonial India: The Deccan Plateau in the 19th Century.

New Delhi: Manohar, 2009. Hardback small octavo, dustjacket, very good plus condition (in very good plus dustjacket), pictorial cover, tables, minor edgewear. 310 pp. Deccan like the rest of British India had all the social economic and material ingredients for proliferation of epidemic diseases. Its population lived in unsanitary conditions, consumed contaminated water, and was crowded into wretched houses: extreme poverty, sunk in debt, and suffering from serious food shortage and malnutrition. The existence of mass poverty and its denial by the colonial state made the situation worse. This book argues that the reason for dysentery diarrhoea and bowel complaints was really malnutrition undernourishment and the general poverty of the masses. Even though the diseases were associated with poverty and malnutrition, the British imperial medical establishment continued to blindly adhere to its non-contagion miasmatic ideology. When the imperial state created hundreds of miles of roads and railways, diseases like cholera malaria, smallpox and plague proliferated everywhere.