This paper will examine cross-cultural encounters relating to medicine at the turn of the nineteenth century, a period in which the East India Company was tightening its grip on India and in which cultural alignments were shifting, sometimes radically. Its main purpose is to examine Indo-Muslim attitudes towards Western medicine and to revisit the more familiar question of British attitudes towards medicine practised by Indians. It seeks to determine the grounds on which certain forms of knowledge were accepted as legitimate and useful while others were rejected. In keeping with the main theme of the conference, the paper focuses on medical knowledge which was actively employed or acquired in the workplace. In this sense it differs from the majority of scholarship which has concentrated on cross-cultural interpretations of texts.

The paper proposes to examine the practice of medicine in the court of the Nawab of the Carnatic, which was a nominally independent state under intense pressure from the East India Company, to which it was heavily indebted financially and militarily. This section of paper focuses on the transition from the second to the third nawabs of the Walajah dynastry and it examines the relative status of medical practitioners from different traditions in the court. The nawabs employed practitioners of Western and other medical traditions, and ostensibly their court was a cosmopolitan place of learning. Beneath the surface, however, tensions were increasingly evident, and this was demonstrated in both the patronage and the practice of medicine. By the turn of the nineteenth century, medical access to the body of the nawab became a battleground for rival factions and ultimately determined the fate of the nawabi.

The second part of the paper will compare with the situation in the court of the Carnatic to other places in which Indian Muslims encountered Western knowledge, for example the hospitals of the East India Company and on travels to Europe. Of particular interest is the account given of anatomy and dissection at the medical school of Oxford University by the traveller Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. The translation of the original manuscript of these travels omits some of the details of this encounter out of consideration for the reader, whom, it was presumed, would find them either distasteful or of little interest. If time permits, the missing portion of the MSS will be translated and analysed.