Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal

Book excerpt: Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal is the third volume produced under the aegis of the Wellcome Trust (London) funded documentation project 'Western Medicine and Indigenous Society: History of Disease, Medicine and Public Health Policy in Colonial Eastern India, (1757-1947)'. While the first volume documented the context in which hospitals were established in Calcutta during the rule of the British East India Company, and the second analysed the trauma caused by tuberculosis in the public health system of twentieth-century India, the present volume brings together selections from official reports on cholera, malaria and smallpox-the three diseases which repeatedly struck colonial Bengal as epidemics. Its objective is to provide a useful resource for researchers, with ready entry points for reconstructing the incidence of these diseases, their mortality rates, social and economic effects as well as colonial medical interventions to contain them. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of studying epidemics that have struck human society in a historical continuum and the significance of the present collation needs to be viewed in this context. The book will be a welcome contribution to the rapidly developing field of History of Medicine.