Book Review

Madhwi, Health, Medicine and Migration: The Formation of Indentured Labour, c. 1834–1920, Primus Books: New Delhi, 2020, xii+383 pages, Rs 1395.

Michel Foucault in his path-breaking work The Birth of the Clinic (1973) delineates two significant developments in the field of (western) medicine in the nineteenth century. First was the broader epistemological shift marked by the development of the idea of the ‘medical gaze’; and the second was the shift in the utility of medicine marked by ‘a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical technology’ (Foucault 1973, pp. 38–39).