Abstract
In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) initiated public health work in a number of locations in the Indian Ocean region. It represented the RF’s global vision for public health underscored by a belief in the promotion of preventive care through demonstration and education, particularly in regions that were considered to be underdeveloped.1 Lt. Col. Walter King, a former Sanitary Commissioner of Madras, had lamented that in India, “education by practical demonstration of sanitary works for the community has been grossly neglected in the rural areas” and blamed the government, educated elected representatives of the local bodies, and the military-oriented and European-dominated Indian Medical Service (IMS) for this state of affairs.2 The RF program, which consisted of an anti-hookworm campaign and demonstration rural health units that were to serve as the vanguard of a public health system focused on preventive health, sanitation, health education, and community participation, addressed an important lacuna in Indian public health.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The campaigns were conducted by the International Health Commission, a constituent agency of the RF, later renamed the International Health Board and finally the International Health Division. Here RF is used for convenience. For a history of the division, see J. Farley (2004), To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913–1951) (New York: Oxford University Press).
D. Arnold (1994), “Colonial Medicine in Transition: Medical Research in India, 1910–14,” South Asia Research, 14: 10–35.
S. Bhattacharya, M. Harrison, and M. Worboys (2005), Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India 1800–1947 (New Delhi: Orient Longman)
Khalid A. (2009), “’subordinate’ Negotiations: Indigneous Staff, the Colonial State and Public Health,” in The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India, ed. B. Pati and M. Harrison (Delhi: Primus Books), pp. 45–73.
Stein, E. (2012), “Hygiene and Decolonization: The Rockefeller Foundation and Indonesian Nationalism, 1933–1958,” in Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia, ed. Liping Bu, Darwin Stapleton and Ka-Che Yip (New York: Roudedge), pp. 51–70.
V. Heiser (1936), An American Doctor’s Odyssey—Adventures in Forty-Five Countries (New York: Norton), p. 344.
Deepak Kumar (2008), “Questions of Public Health and Foreign Philanthropy: Rockefeller Foundation in India, 1915–1945,” in Historical Diversities: Society, Politics and Culture, ed. K. L. Tuteja and S. Pathania (Delhi: Manohar), pp. 193–207.
Government of India (1914), Indian Sanitary Policy, 1914 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India), p. 9.
C. Baker (1975), “Figures and Facts. Madras Government Statistics 1880–1940,” in South India: Political Institutions and Political Change, 1880–1940, ed. C. Baker and D. Washbrook (Delhi: Macmillan), p. 210.
H. Tinker (1968), Foundations of Local Self Government in India, Pakistan and Burma (London: Praeger), p. 280.
About the centuries-old unchanged sanitary habits of the rural population in the American south, see W. A. Link (1990), “The Harvest Is Ripe, but the Laborers Are Few: The Hookworm Crusade in North Carolina, 1909–1915,” The North Carolina Historical Review, 67: 1–27
J. Ettling (1981), The Germ of Laziness, Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
For accounts of the hookworm campaign in Madras, see S. N. Kavadi (2002), “‘Wolves Come to Take Care of the Lamb’: The Rockefeller Foundation’s Hookworm Campaign in The Madras Presidency, 1920–1928,” in The Politics of the Healthy Life: An International Perspective, ed. Esteban Rodriguez Ocaña (Sheffield: EAHMH Publications)
S. N. Kavadi (2007), “‘Parasites Lost and Parasites Regained’: Rockefeller Foundation’s Anti-Hookworm Campaign in Madras Presidency,” Economic and Political Weekly, 72: 130–137.
V. R. Muraleedharan and D. Veeragahvan (1995), “Disease, Death and Local Administration: Madras City in Early 1900s,” Radical Journal of Health, 1: 9–24.
Rockefeller Foundation (1922), “Distribution and Control of Hookworm Disease in India, International Health Board,” Indian Journal of Medical Research, 10: 295–342.
S. Hewa (1994), “The Hookworm Epidemic on the Plantations in Colonial Sri Lanka,” Medical History, 38: 73–90
L. A. Gordon (1997), “Wealth Equals Wisdom? The Rockefeller and Ford Foundation in India,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 554: 105.
S. Watts (2003), Disease and Medicine in World History (New York: Routledge), p. 118.
Ibid., p. 291; Government of India (1942), Health Atlas of India (Delhi: Government of India Press).
J. Farley (1995), “The International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation: The Russell Years,” in International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939, ed. P. Weindling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 203–221.
A. Birn and A. Solorzano (1999), “Public Health Policy Paradoxes: Science and Politics in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Hookworm Campaign in Mexico in the 1920s,” Social Science and Medicine, 49: 1197–1213
Ibid.; also see S. Palmer (2010), “Toward Responsibility in International Health: Death following Treatment in Rockefeller Hookworm Campaigns, 1914–1934,” Medical History, 54: 149–170.
Government of India (1946), Health Survey and Development Committee Report, Vol. 4 (New Delhi: Government of India Press), p. vi.
S. N. Kavadi (2010), “‘Clear Stream of Reason...Lost Its Way into the Dreary Desert Sand of Dead Habit’: The Story of the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, Calcutta, 1922–45,” in Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, c. 1784–1947, ed. Uma Das Gupta (New Delhi: Pearson).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2016 Shirish N. Kavadi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kavadi, S.N. (2016). Rockefeller Public Health in Colonial India. In: Winterbottom, A., Tesfaye, F. (eds) Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567581_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567581_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56269-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56758-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)