Imperial wards: South Asian women doctors and the networking of medical institutions in the late-Victorian British Empire

Imperial Wards explores the peripatetic careers of first-generation South Asian women doctors as they moved within and between medical schools and hospitals across colonial India and the UK. In so doing, it presents a new spatial history of women’s medicine in the British empire, one that moves past the London and Calcutta binary which have served as stand-ins for ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’ in the historiography. Conversely, this dissertation traces structural connections through the medical institutions of Madras, Edinburgh, and Bombay, while searching for the experiences of South Asian women doctors therein. In particular, it centers the career of one totally consequential but hitherto overlooked physician, Annie Wardlaw Jagannadham, who was the first non-white woman to study and practice medicine in British history. Through a variegated empirical base — which includes colonial government proceedings, hospital records, missionary records, and the patient case files of Jagannadham herself — collected from multiple archival sites in Edinburgh, London, Mumbai, and Chennai, the project uses Jagannadham as a mobile vantage point to capture the consequences of structural discrimination in the imperial medical profession. Ultimately, such inquiries pinpoint the racism and sexism of colonial medicine in the late-Victorian era by re-mapping the institutionalization of India’s medical women along a transnational grid.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Vitale, Stephen

Contributors dc:contributor

• Burton, Antoinette
• Rabin, Dana
• Hogarth, Rana
• van der Spuy, Patricia

• Medicine
• Women Doctors
• Britain
• Empire
• Race
• Gender
• Mobility.

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Stephen Vitale

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124710

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124710