Recommend to librarian. Buy Rights to this title. Request a Review or Inspection Copy. This is the first full-length monograph to examine the history of colonial medicine in India from the perspective of veterinary health. The history of human health in the subcontinent has received a fair amount of attention in the last few decades, but nearly all existing texts have completely ignored the question of animal health.
This book will not only fill this gap, but also provide fresh perspectives and insights that might challenge existing arguments. At the same time, this volume is a social history of cattle in India.
Keeping the question of livestock at the centre, it explores a range of themes such as famines, agrarian relations, urbanisation, middle-class attitudes, caste formations etc. The overall aim is to integrate medical history with social history in a way that has not often been attempted. For historians of medicine, who are often a separate community from mainstream historians, this book serves as a reminder of how this divide is often an artificial one, and how intricately medical history is woven into the fabric of our broader histories.
D, Independent Scholar, Journal of the History of Medicine, September 'Overall, this book is a fine read that should be consulted by scholars and students of the history of public health and veterinary medicine, but also in general South Asian history. It admirably fulfils its main task of integrating the larger social history of livestock with veterinary medicine by bringing into focus several unfamiliar histories and connecting a number of seemingly disengaged plots and themes.
In doing so, it produces a broader definition of public in India health to include veterinary medicine. Beastly Encounters is an original, unique and introspective book. It makes us think about veterinary history from an entirely new perspective as it links histories of caste, urban consumerism and famines with that of animal health.
