Dimensions of Authenticity in Siddha Medical and Clinical Research

Abstract

The article discusses three methods of combining biomedicine with traditional medicine in pre-Independence Madras State in India, with comparative examples drawn from ethnographic studies in South India in the 1990s. In the mid to late 1920s, two officers of modern medicine from the Madras presidency were delegated to be trained in the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine to investigate the properties of the indigenous drugs of India using laboratory and physiological techniques. In the 1930s, Srinivasamurti, the first principal of the Government School of Indian Medicine in Madras, trialed a collaborative approach between clinical practitioners of ayurveda, siddha, and unani, and allopathic medical registrars with the ideal of developing a universal and synthetic textbook encompassing all medical systems on an equal setting. In the 1940s, a traditional practitioner was permitted to practice bone setting in the Government Hospital of Indian Medicine in Madras. These examples illustrate various dimensions of asymmetric relations between traditional and modern medicine in twentieth- and twenty-first-century India.