Soldiers, surgeons and the campaigns to combat sexually transmitted diseases in colonial India, 1805-1860.

Officers in the military and medical establishments of colonial India agreed that preserving the health of European troops in India must be one of their highest priorities for, without an adequate supply of healthy Europeans at hand, British rule might be jeopardized. Periodic mutinies and other manifestations of discontent amongst the sepoys reminded Europeans that they could not take sepoy loyalty for granted. Events in 1857 would confirm what many officers were already insisting upon at the beginning of the nineteenth century: a large reserve of European soldiers was needed to keep the sepoys in check. But Europeans were much more likely than sepoys to become casualty statistics: data from 1836 confirmed that European soldiers were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized as Indian sepoys.1 The situation was much the same twelve years later when troop returns from 1848 for the Bengal army listed 847 deaths from among the 15,558 Europeans on strength, but only 1,065 deaths from among the more than 100,000 sepoys.2 Therefore the British directed a good deal of attention to those diseases thought most threatening to the European rank and file, particularly cholera, malaria, and dysentery. This being the case, it is not surprising that these diseases have been the subject of some very important recent works on the history of colonial medicine.3 Yet if we extend our