Abstract
This chapter explores the crisis and eventual decline of interconnected public health initiatives in the Asian arena, spanning the period between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s. Many of the difficulties of the mass campaigns of the 1950s arose from the uncertainties, of prevention, both practical and epistemological. The gaps between the seen and the unseen — the ‘small injection’ and ‘disease later in life’; the disappearance and reappearance of anopheles mosquitoes — caused problems for planners, health workers and patients alike. This led to a renewed attempt to put into practice yet newer and better technologies that might bring about the finality of cure.
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Notes
See Chapter 5, above. Tuberculosis Chemotherapy Centre, ‘A Concurrent Comparison of Home and Sanatorium Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis in South India’, Bulletin of the WHO, 21 (1959), 51–144.
7 Chemotherapy Centre, ‘Concurrent Comparison’, p. 109. On the sanatoria of Victorian Britain, see Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). For another perspective on changing treatments of tuberculosis over time, see Alison Bashford, ‘Tuberculosis and Immigration in Australia, 1901–2001: The Great White Plague Turns Alien’, in M. Worboys and F. Condrau (eds), The History of Tuberculosis in International Perspective (London/New York: Routledge, 2006, forthcoming). I thank Dr Bashford for showing me the typescript.
National Tuberculosis Institute, Bangalore, Annals of the NTI: 40 Years of Accomplishment (Bangalore: NTI, 2000), p. 24.
D. Banerji, ‘Society, Health Problems, Modern Medicine and Social Medicine: An Analysis of Their Inter-relationship in a Cross-Cultural Context’, Cornell University dissertation, 1963. [Cornell University, Kocher Library, rare books and manuscripts, Thesis 1963 B.215].
D. Banerji and S. Andersen, ‘A Sociological Study of Awareness of Symptoms among Persons with Pulmonary Tuberculosis’, Bulletin of the WHO, 29 (1963), 665–83, p. 665.
S. Andersen and D. Banerji, ‘A Sociological Enquiry into an Urban Tuberculosis Control Programme in India’, Bulletin of WHO, 29 (1963), 685–700, p. 691.
Monica Felton, ‘Letter from India: Tackling Tuberculosis in India’, New Society, 52 (26 September 1963).
WHO, International Work in Tuberculosis, 1949–1964 (Geneva, 1965), p. 15.
WHO, Expert Committee on Tuberculosis, Eighth Report, Technical Reports Series, 290 (Geneva, 1964), pp. 3–4.
WHO, Expert Committee on Tuberculosis, Eighth Report, Technical Reports Series, No. 290 (Geneva, 1964).
M.C. Raviglione, A. Pio, ‘Evolution of WHO policies for tuberculosis control, 1948–2001’, The Lancet, 359 (2002), pp. 775–80.
Miss K. Das, ‘Problems of Relief for Poor Tuberculosis Patients’, Proceedings of the 14th Tuberculosis Workers’ Conference, Madras, January 1958 (TB Association of India) [National Tuberculosis Institute Library, Bangalore], pp. 150–5. My emphases.
C.M. Lomasney, WHO Nurse, ‘Assignment Report on the Nursing Aspects of the Tuberculosis Chemotherapy Centre, Madras’. WHO. SEA/TB/44 (July 1963) [Restircted], p. 16.
This is James C. Scott’s term. J.C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London, 1998).
M.N. Srinivas, Indian Society Through Personal Writings (New Delhi, 1998), pp. 53–5. On the broader struggles over urban space in Bangalore in this period, see J. Nair, ‘Battles for Bangalore: Reterritorializing the City’, available at http://www.sephis.org/pdf/nairpap.pdf. See also, S. Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture 10, 1(1997), pp. 83–113.
See, for example, WHO Tuberculosis Chemotherapy Centre, Nairobi, ‘Drug Acceptability in Domiciliary Tuberculosis Control Programmes’, Bulletin of the WHO, 1963, 29, 627–39.
I.B. Throup, ‘Assignment Report on Tuberculosis Control Programme in Burma’, Appendix 23, WHO. SEA/TB/67 (1967) [Restricted].
J. Siddiqi, World Health and World Politics: The World Health Organization and the UN System (London: Hurst, 1995), p. 154.
M.J. Colbourne, ‘Prospects for Malaria Eradication with Special Reference to the Western Pacific’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 56 (1962), pp. 179–201, p. 179.
Government of Ceylon, Administration Report of the Director of Health Services for 1956, Dr D.L.J. Kahawita (Colombo, 1957), pp. 15–16.
G. Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities Since 1880 (London: John Murray, 1978), p. 254.
F.R.S. Kellett, ‘Field visit report on malaria eradication programme, Ceylon’, WHO. SEA/Mal/51, 14 May 1965 [Restricted]. See also A. Gabaldon, ‘Assignment report on malaria eradication, Ceylon’, WHO. SEA/Mal/59, 12 July 1966 [Restricted].
Cited in V.P. Sharma and K.N. Mehrotra, ‘Malaria Resurgence in India: A Critical Study’, Social Science and Medicine, 22, 8 (1986), 835–45, p. 839.
R. Dubos, Man Adapting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 374–5.
N.S. Scrimshaw, C.E. Taylor, J.E. Gordon, Interactions of Nutrition and Infection (Geneva: Who Monograph Series 57, 1968); W. McDermott, ‘Modern Medicine and the Demographic-Disease Pattern of Overly Traditional Societies: A Technological Misfit’. Journal of Medical Education, 41, 9 September 1966, pp. 137–62; Kunitz, ‘Explanations and Ideologies’; W.H. Mosely and L.C. Chen, ‘An Analytical Framework for the Study of Child Survival in Developing Countries’, in Mosely and Chen (eds), Child Survival: Strategies for Research, Population and Development Review, 10 (1984), supplement.
P. Demeny, ‘Social Science and Population Policy’, Population and DevelopmentReview, 14, 3 (1988), 451–79, p. 458.
Matthew Connelly, ‘The Cutting Edge of Population Control: The Origins of Coercive Family Planning in India’, (forthcoming, 2006). I thank the author for sharing a draft with me.
D. Fenner, D.A. Henderson et al., Smallpox and its Eradication (Geneva: WHO, 1978), full text of over 1,000 pages available at http://www.who.int/emc/diseases/smallpox/Smallpoxeradication.html.
Harish Naraindas, ‘Crisis, Charisma and Triage: Extirpating the Pox’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, XL, 4 (2003), 425–58, p. 456. See also P. Greenough, ‘Intimidation, Coercion and Resistance in the Final Stages of the Smallpox Eradication Campaign, 1973–75’, Social Science and Medicine, 41, 5 (1995), 633–45.
Dr H. Mahler, ‘Priority Considerations for the Formulation of an Effective National Tuberculosis Programme in Africa’, Seminar on Integrated Tuberculosis Control, Brazzaville, 1969, p. 5. WHO, AFR 192/03–04.
S.R. Whyte, S. van der Geest and A. Hardon, Social Lives of Medicines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 24, pp. 88–9.
H.V. Wyatt, ‘The popularity of injections in the Third World: Origins and Consequences for Poliomyelitis’, Social Science and Medicine, 19 (1984), 911–15.
See Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. chapter six.
Anant Phadke, Drug Supply and Use: Towards a Rational Policy in India (New Delhi: Sage, 1998).
Whyte, et al., Medicines; see also D. Melrose, Bitter Pills: Medicines and the Third World Poor (Oxford: Oxfam, 1982).
See the moving ethnographic study by Sheila Zurbrigg, Rakku’s Story: Structures of Ill Health and the Source of Change (Bangalore: Centre for Social Action, 1984).
M. Nichter, Anthropology and International Health: South Asian Case Studies (Amsterdam: Kluwer, 1989), p. 235. This is a view echoed by health activist Anant Phadke (in Drug Supply and Use), and in many interviews I conducted with health workers in India, too numerous to name: I thank them for sharing their insights and experiences, and hope to incorporate these more fully in future work.
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© 2006 Sunil S. Amrith
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Amrith, S.S. (2006). The Limits of Disease Control. In: Decolonizing International Health. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627369_7
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