Strip of rolled cinchona bark, India, 1860-1910
Credit: Science Museum, London.
Michaelmas Term 2012 History of Medicine Seminar Series
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine,
Seminar Room, 47 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE
The following seminars will be held at on Mondays at 2.15pm
Coffee will be available from 2.00pm
‘Health and Medicine in Britain and its Empire’
Convener: Professor Mark Harrison
Week 7 – 19 November
Rohan Deb Roy, University of Cambridge
Science, Materials and Empire: Making Pure Quinine in British India, 1867-1890
About the speaker
Rohan Deb Roy is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, and is currently rewriting his doctoral dissertation (‘Malarial Connections: Diagnostic Categories, Medical Authorities and Market Situations in British India and beyond, 1820–1912’) into a book manuscript. This work draws upon historical literature about the disease-causing entity ‘malaria’, the drug quinine, cinchona plants and mosquitoes. It revisits the concept of empire by exploring complex concatenations of conversations about imperial agency and nonhuman actancy. He has also begun research on a newer project, which focuses on metaphors and materials associated with the category ‘insects’ in South Asian history between the late eighteenth and mid twentieth centuries.
Selected publications
- ‘Of Tropics, Prisons and Bicycles: A Conversation with David Arnold‘, Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, 2010/11 Volume 6.1.
- ‘Maladies of Modernity: Malaria and the Making of Burdwan Fever’, in Saurabh Dube (ed.) Modern Makeovers: The Oxford Handbook of Modernity in South Asia, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, July 2011. Copies held in the Bodleian Libraries 017878937 ]
Related Links
- SOLO Library Catalogue – search Oxford libraries online
- Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine events webpage
- Medical History of British India by National Library of Scotland