History of Medicine in India: Reading Recommendations for Doctors and Other Healthcare Practitioners

5 min readJan 16, 2021

“A group of Plague staff, Karachi, India [now Pakistan]. Photograph, 1897.” Credit: Wellcome Collection

Over the past two years I fortunately have had the time and resources to read some excellent scholarship on the history of medicine and public health in India. These books and articles have helped me better understand the historical origins and trajectories of the different unique aspects of healthcare in our country.

For example, one of the most common themes in discussions on public health in India is federalism — the fact that much of the decision-making power lies in the hands of state and other local governments and not the Central government. [Federalism is in my opinion is absolutely important and necessary, and recent trends towards undermining it are highly worrying.] However, it is not commonly known that the origins of this power-sharing lie in the politics of India’s struggle for independence during the British colonial rule. In the late 1800s Indians were becoming more and more assertive in demanding autonomy, and British administrators had to make increasingly expansive compromises. Public health was considered by the British as a kind of dispensable area of governance, a subject which they could bring themselves to part with in order to placate politically demanding Indians. In the late 1800s, for example, many local city governments — with mostly Indians in charge — received the power to control public health policy within the confines of their regions.

The most significant arrangement, however, came about in 1918–19 with the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms which transferred several subjects of administration to provincial governments (the equivalent of state governments of today), which were beginning to be led by Indian as against British officers. Public health and sanitation were among those subjects. These 1919 reforms were thus the beginning of the way public health has been conceived in India ever since, with power shared between states and the Centre, and with states rightly getting the larger say.

I decided to create the following lists of books and articles (which I’ll continue to expand) to introduce healthcare professionals and other interested persons to some important scholarly books and articles that help us understand such fascinating nuances of medicine and healthcare in India. Generally when medical students and doctors come across any writing on the history of medicine, it mostly is framed in terms of “glorious indigenous past” or “great doctors and researchers doing great things/saving humanity” themes. We rarely are exposed to detailed and elaborate analyses of events, people, and communities, and of the complex social, political and economic forces which have influenced healthcare and medicine. Scholarly history writing does exactly that, and in my opinion is essential reading if one wishes to understand the world of healthcare more comprehensively than how it is taught in medical colleges.