Among the changes that accompanied the long nineteenth century – a period stretching from the onset of the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War – developments in the nature and practice of medicine received the attention of thinkers and social scientists relatively late. It was in the 1960s and 1970s, through the writings of critical thinkers like Erving Goffman (Asylums as Total Institutions), Michel Foucault (The Birth of a Clinic), Erwin H. Ackerknecht (Medicine at the Paris Hospital 1794–1848), and later N. D. Jewson (The Disappearance of the Sick-Man From Medical Cosmology 1770–1870), that these previously obscure changes were conceptualised for the first time, setting the ball rolling. They identified several transformations taking shape in day-to-day life, such as the gradual erasure of the sick person from medical cosmology and their reduction to irregular graphs, statistical tables, figures, and forms; and a procedural shift in which signs and symptoms began to be treated as discrete diseases. These scholars argued that such changes signalled the rise of a new kind of knowledge which was more systematic and institutionalised both in its content and form.

These newer forms of knowledge were produced in particular institutional spaces. Prominent among these institutions were the medical schools/colleges and their allied hospitals, which served as ‘new centres of learning’. It was in these centres that shifts from the older form of ‘bedside medicine’ towards the newer form of ‘hospital medicine’ took place. These changes were studied extensively in the institutional settings of Paris by Michel Foucault and Erwin Ackerknecht, of Leiden by Evan Ragland, of Edinburgh by J.B. Morrell, and of Bologna by Kira Robinson across a longer historical period. In conversation with such historical scholarship and theoretical conceptions, Jayanta Bhattacharya produced a book-length study of the first modern medical college in South Asia, the Calcutta Medical College (hereafter CMC), established in 1835, and argued that ‘earlier books, monographs and research work to my knowledge, have never dealt with this particular question of “hospital medicine” with respect to the CMC’ (p. xx).

Bhattacharya also responds to Mark Harrison, Margret Jones, and Helen Sweet’s call in the edited volume From Western Medicine to Global Medicine (2009): in order to answer the question of how ‘Western’ medicine became the dominant form of medicine around the world, it is necessary to study the histories of medical institutions in non-Western settings. Their observation was that, despite being the most striking feature in the medical history of the non-Western world, these institutions have received very little attention.

This historiographical positioning of Bhattacharya’s work makes it quite significant in the sense that, on the one hand, there is a set of historians of South Asian medical history who have focused their attention on the big questions such as what made colonial medicine ‘colonial’, or how ‘public’ was the notion of public health in British India, while on the other hand there is another set of historians who have concentrated on understanding the social dimensions of epidemics and particular diseases. What is left out are important granular inquiries into the role of institutions in promoting, professionalising, and glocalising ‘Western’ medicine. These issues have largely been taken up by physician-scholars who have written about these institutions and their histories for a very long time. It is worth mentioning that Jayanta Bhattacharya belongs to this lineage of dedicated scholar-physicians of independent India. Among them were various senior medical professionals, such as Sohan Lal Bhatia, D. V. Subba Reddy, D. M. Telang, Om Prakash Jaggi, A. Ramachari, and Sunil K. Pandya, who equally contributed to the field of medical history, as they did to the medical profession.

The book Calcutta Medical College, 1822–1897 consists of ten chapters, and the major strength of the work lies in the introduction and chapter one. It is in these chapters that the author attempts to place CMC’s rise within a theoretical and comparative framework by contrasting its trajectory with the global patterns of development in the nature of medicine (pp. 1–8, 25–44). These chapters highlight the relevance of tracing these shifts in different geographical and cultural settings. However, it is disappointing that the book ends up following a conventional chronological narrative, contrary to what the author promises by stating,

The succeeding chapters in the book attempt to trace the journey of the medical college in a similar linear fashion (following the beaten paths), with titles framed as ‘from … to …’, and therefore conclude without any new findings.

In the book, much emphasis is given to the utilisation of collected information, with less emphasis on deeper analysis. This is reflected in the structure of the book as it begins by locating the development of ‘hospital medicine’ through the prism of CMC, but then digresses into additional chapters on female education and public health. Along with this, there are several other limitations to this work, particularly in relation to the question of the colonial archive and the method of analysis. The work adopts a positivist and uncritical reading of the colonial medical records available in the English language, such as annual administrative reports on public instructions, proceedings of the medical college, official correspondence, and reporting in medical journals, which ultimately reinforce colonial biases and narratives. Along with this, the excessive reliance on paraphrasing disrupts the narrative flow, and frequent citations from primary sources are often left without any elaboration or adequate analysis. Lastly, the most striking issue concerns inconsistencies and errors. There are multiple instances where the same paragraphs have been copied in several places. For example, the long paragraph that begins at the end of page 61 (and continues onto the next page) is reproduced verbatim on pages 79–80. Similarly, the passage under the subheading ‘Foundation of the Native Medical Institution’ on page 44 is repeated in the opening paragraph of Chapter 2, titled ‘The Beginnings of the Native Medicinal Institution’, on page 60. Nevertheless, by focusing on the lived experience of a medical institution like CMC, this study has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the complex processes through which Western medicine was institutionalised and professionalised in colonial India. Such modest but carefully analysed work on new social histories of medical institutions in other non-Western locations can help us trace the deeper roots of medicine in those societies and open up fresh lines of inquiry.