Making epidemics in colonial Bengal as its entry point and drawing heavily on social, cultural and linguistic anthropology to understand the functions of health experiences, distribution of illness, prevention of sickness, social relations of therapeutic intervention and employment of pluralistic medical systems, the book interrogates the social construction of medical knowledge, politics of science, and the changing paradigm of relationship between health of the individual and the prerogatives of larger colonial economic formations. Smallpox, plague, cholera and malaria which visited...