Imperial Pharmakon: Writing and Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century

“Imperial Pharmakon (2025) by Sandhya Shetty invites its readers into the colonial Indian landscape through the intertwined histories of writing and medicine in the long nineteenth century. … the book adroitly converses with Derridean thought in a vitally renewed context. Tracing the echoes of this exchange one may recognise the book’s signal contribution as found in its opening epigraph: the pharmakon is never simply beneficial.” (Arya Sarkar, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, May 12, 2026)

Full of surprises and unexpected detours, Imperial Pharmakon tells a multi-sided story of western medicine in colonial conditions. Highlighting side effects and complications, the book nuances the conventional narrative that colonial medical discourse was oppressive, commanding, and unrelievedly prosaic. Underscoring nineteenth-century medicine’s entanglement in various projects of colonial poeisis, the book explicates its grand rhetoric, its sluggish humors, and its often-violent administrative argot on the one hand, and its seductive address, its creation of new desires and proximities, and its allyship with endeavors beyond its remit, on the other.

This examination of medicine’s reversible moods and modes in colonial conditions is anchored in British India. Given its long exposure to imperial rule and administration, colonial India offers a unique set of historical materials that facilitates the book’s long and wide view of its subject. A transimperial lens articulates colonial and metropolitan medical history, making the networked relationality of medicine newly visible and meaningful while the longue durée approach illumines broad shifts that develop and disclose themselves over time. The singularity of the British Indian case also prompts this study’s reimagination of the geographies, actors, and issues deemed relevant in scholarship within established fields such as literature and medicine and history of colonial medicine. Imperial Pharmakon de-provincializes the former and deepens the latter by rendering the question of medicine in a different key.

Emphasizing the analytic salience of literary and postcolonial forms of knowing, this study also brings a fresh ecological perspective to the question of medicine in coloniality. Moving across individual and collective scales and human/nonhuman divides, it offers granular readings of historical events and actors while keeping an eye on perimedical figures (the animal), practices (vegetarianism) and concepts (friend/enemy) that tacitly structure medicine’s primordial capacity for hostility and hospitality, its biopolitical grammar, and its ecological unconscious.

Sandhya Shetty is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, USA.