Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India
'Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India' is a show about history and historians hosted by Kiran Kumbhar and produced by Suno India. It explores the history of medicine and public health in India (South Asia), and focuses on events and developments which occurred primarily in the nineteenth century, or the 1800s, and which laid the foundations for the later development of healthcare and health policy in India. The podcast traces the genesis of many of contemporary India's healthcare structures and institutions, and provides the necessary historical context to why healthcare in the country today is the way it is. This knowledge about our medical past will be provided directly by historians who have worked on medicine and public health in British colonial India, and who will be featured regularly in every episode of the show. We will also hear from them about their personal journey of becoming a historian, and on how they write history and what social scientific methods they use to analyze the past and enlighten us about historical personalities, events and ideas. This Podcast is made possible by a grant from the Thakur Family Foundation. Thakur family foundation has not exercised any editorial control over the contents of this podcast.
Episodes
This is the seventh and final episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We talk about one of the most enduring aspects of modernization in Indian healthcare: the emergence of the biomedical profession. Who were the earliest “doctors” in the subcontinent? Why did British colonizers establish medical colleges and schools in India? What were the experiences of early women doctors? How has ...
This is the sixth episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We focus on a highly familiar but misunderstood topic - the history of Ayurveda - and explore why despite the wonderful diversity of the subcontinent’s medical history, we have come to honor just Ayurveda and a few other traditions while ignoring the rest. We discuss this history by focusing on a problematic cognitive framework...
This is the fifth episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We discuss a basic question here: how do people become historians? History is certainly not among the subjects that children and teenagers in India are universally encouraged to pursue, so we asked historians how it is that they chose this option during high school or college. Not surprisingly, there isn't a single, uniform track to enter t...
This is the fourth episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We talk about the idea that governments can and should work towards improving public health and providing healthcare-related services for the public. While such a concept of state responsibility towards public health is very common and naturalized today (and absolutely important), it is a relatively modern concept in a historical sense, an...
This is the third episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". The primary theme pertains to the challenges, in historical research, of finding and incorporating the voices of the oppressed and the under-privileged (the "voiceless"). In the history of healthcare, which has traditionally been dominated by the perspectives and voices of male physicians, the absent or under-represented voices have mostly ...
This is the second episode of 'Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India'. We talk about one of the central challenges of writing any kind of history: how to find and incorporate the voices of the oppressed and the under-privileged (the "voiceless")? In the history of healthcare, this challenge manifests in the form of the disproportionate focus on physicians and surgeons, and a concomitant neglect of the stories of patients...
In this introductory episode of 'Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India', host Kiran Kumbhar talks with Suno India co-founder Padma Priya about how the podcast was created and the ideas that went into it. They talk about the importance of knowing the history of medicine and healthcare, and the crucial role of critical thinking skills in writing history and understanding the past.
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