Preventative Care in the Preindustrial World: Comparative and Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Conference Location:
India International Center, New Delhi, INDIA
Conference Dates:
12-15 June 2025
OVERVIEW:
We are proud to announce our conference in New Delhi, India, on 12-15 June, on the topic of “Preventative Care in the Preindustrial World: Comparative and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.”
This conference is a showcase of 2 years of research and collaboration with our 4-year project “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800“, which began in late 2022.
Conference Organisers:
Professor Farhat Hasan (Delhi University)
Dr Mukhtar Ahmed (Delhi University)
Professor Guy Geltner (Monash University)
While we are already finalising presentations, if you are interested in presenting please feel free to express your interest to either Farhat Hasan (fhasan15@gmail.com) or Guy Geltner (guy.geltner@monash.edu). Otherwise, please stay tuned for more information about how to attend.
This conference will by hybrid with options for online attendance.
CONFERENCE THEME:
We are interested in exploring the contours for a global history of preventative care before the development of the modern, industrialised world. We have invited presentations that are comparative and cross-cultural, and bring out affinities and divergences in health practices across different regions and cultures. Given the relative dearth of research on preindustrial public health, we have welcomed papers that enrich our empirical base and provide fresh insights and perspectives from unexplored medical treatises and historical and religious texts, epigraphs, images, architecture and archaeological sites and reports. We are interested in studying ‘pre-‘ and early modern health practices, with a view to recover ‘public’ health practices across different civilisations; and look at inter-connections and comparative perspectives that help us better understand modern public health in our globalised, connected world. For too long now, discussions on public health have focused on the modern, urban and western world, leading to a lopsided, Eurocentric understanding of public health, and in order to redress the imbalance, we are highlighting papers that deal with the non-European world, in particular, South Asia, the Persianate world, and the Indian Ocean network in the pre-colonial period.
One of our concerns is to look at the health practices in the ancient and prehistoric periods, and we invite papers that look at the ancient texts and archaeological finds for the purpose. We hope to have contributions on the health practices in the Delhi Sultanate, the Deccan states and the Mughal empire in India, but we would appreciate if they have a comparative thrust, and draw comparisons with the larger Persianate world. We have also looked for presentations that help us look at conversations between Europe and Asia in the precolonial world, in the context of medical knowledge and health practices.
In studying health practices, we would be looking at the role of environment, and perceptions of the role of water, air and cleanliness in bodily care and good health. We would also be studying the interrelations between body and spirit, and the role that ritual and religious practices played in preventative practices. In this context, we would like to examine the bodily health practices of itinerant communities, in particular, soldiers, miners, sufi-saints, Hindu ascetics, Buddhist and Jain monks, merchants and travellers, and bring out the inter-relations between space, movement, and body in medical knowledge. With a focus on the non-European world, we expect to explore the sensory world, and its apprehension in medical knowledge. Indeed, we hope to look at the perception of the role of aural, visual, aromatic, and tactile modes of experiences in preventative care in the pre-colonial period. While we are looking at the connections between sensorial experiences and medical knowledge, we hope to focus on the perceptions of the health properties of water in Indic and Islamic world-views, and hopefully, see the conversations between these distinctive, yet connected, traditions of medical knowledge.
The role of women in preventative care, and the significance of household in reproducing medical knowledge is also a theme that interests us. Moving beyond the medical experts and intellectuals, we would also be looking at the ordinary people’s common sense, and how peasants, workers, women, and artisans contributed to enhancing our knowledge about preventative care in the pre-colonial period. In other words, we also intend to bring textual medical knowledge into conversation with everyday medical practices, and look at preventative care at the interstices between texts and orality, knowledge experts and the common people, the courtly culture and ordinary households.
Finally, the strong tendency in the field of public health history has been to focus on cities and urban populations. This is understandable given the unique pressures they have been under from a health perspective, as well as their superior documentation, historically and archaeologically. Yet the vast majority of premodern people lived in or moved through the countryside, including armies, pilgrims and of course numerous villages. Contributions that decentre cities are therefore also very welcome.
Members of our Research Project:
Professor Farhat Hasan (Delhi University)
Dr Mukhtar Ahmed (Delhi University)
Professor Guy Geltner (Monash University)
Megan Cassidy-Welch (University of Divinity, Australia)
Aydogan Kars (Monash University, Australia)
Rose Byfleet (Monash University, Australia)
Shireen Hamza (Northwestern university)
Giovanna Bianchi (Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy)
Luisa Dallai (Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy)
Serena Viva (University of Salento, Italy)
Mauro Buonincontri (Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy)
