The Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine: Institutionalizing medical research in the periphery

Abstract

The creation of the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine (CSTM) reveals much about the priorities of colonial medicine in India during the early years of this century.Efforts to found a school of tropical medicine in the periphery of empire involved complex negotiations between local, central Indian, and imperial government agencies as well as municipal politics over a ten year period from 1910-1920.The involvement of some sections of the Indian middle class in Calcutta supports David Arnold's view that "in the years after 1914 [India's emerging elites] were to take up Western Medicine as part of their own hegemonic project".'A growing number of western-educated Indian medical practitioners were calling for the civil branch of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) to loosen its stranglehold on government medical posts, while the IMS was itself under threat because of falling white recruitment.This paper discusses the foundation of the CSTM from the perspectives of these various groups, placing the organization of medical education and research in tropical diseases in a wider social and political context.Mark Harrison has analysed the implementation of public health policies and the aim is to augment such work by focusing on the foundation of the CSTM, as a detailed example of such action.2The early history of the school has been divided into three overlapping phases: planning; the organization of an endowment fund; and the arrangement of the school's professorial staff.Each of these stages demonstrates the problems of institutionalizing tropical medicine for postgraduate education and research in India.This paper is therefore part of a growing interest in the organization of research and teaching in the periphery, which can be contrasted with schools of tropical medicine in Britain and elsewhere during the same period.The central character in the foundation of the school was Sir Leonard Rogers (1868-1962) of the Indian Medical Service, professor of pathology at the Calcutta Medical College.3Rogers represented the general interests of the IMS, in particular the officers of the civil branch and their difficulties in conducting medical research in India.

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