A soup for the Qan: Chinese dietary medicine of the Mongol era as seen in Hu Szu-Hui's Yin-shan Cheng-yao

with their own. Relations between Western and indigenous medicine are examined from a different perspective in Anil Kumar's account of the Indian drug industry between 1860 and 1920. He argues that, despite some recognition of the richness of indigenous materia medica, the British discouraged the development of an Indian drug industry and were never genuinely committed to import substitution. British policies and practices form a dominant theme of the volume. Official attitudes towards pilgrimages and the epidemic diseases associated with them at Puri and Pandharpur are discussed by Biswamoy Pati and Manjiri Kamat; Sanjoy Bhattacharya traces the technological constraints and policy shifts that informed colonial vaccination policy. In a finely nuanced discussion of the missionary input into imperial medicine, Rosemary Fitzgerald explains how Protestant missionary societies came to realize the opportunities involved in establishing medical missions. So attractive had this strategy become by the 1890s that healing bodies while saving souls became a central objective of missionary work in India. In one of three essays that explore the institutional sites of colonial medicine, Waltraud Ernst uses the Madras asylum to illuminate the role of private profit in the management of lunacy and show how considerations of race and class informed local policy. Focusing on another mental institution, in Lucknow, James Mills questions one of the coercive conventions of colonial literature by asking why some individuals chose to enter asylums or were sent there by their families. This quest for agency among inmates and Indians at large is also prominent in Sanjiv Kakar's account of leper asylums in India and the development of "patient unrest", including desertion from one institution to another where conditions were more congenial. Kakar calls for more investigation of "subaltern resistance" to colonial medicine and of the motives that impelled it. This volume opens up some rich and important case studies and rebuts any brash presumptions about the homogeneity of colonial medicine, but there is a lack of common focus and a reluctance, with few exceptions, to take on big issues or devise a new language of analysis. Reappraisals are more easily promised than delivered.