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This article explores the engagements between the colonial state and indigenous medical practitioners in the Madras Presidency in the early nineteenth century; a period characterised by openness and ambiguous relations. An analysis of textual representations of the 'native practitioner' reveals ambiguity. Often the practitioners were portrayed as representing flawed systems of knowledge, yet possessing valuable insight into specific medical practices. Texts written for internal administrative purposes tended, however, to view the native practitioner more as a resource for the colonial state than a representative of worthless bodies of knowledge. Turning to actual engagements with native practitioners a varied, context-sensitive picture emerges. In connection with the campaign to prevent smallpox, the native practitioner was envisaged as both a self-interested entrepreneur and a zealous bureaucratic servant. When an epidemic fever struck the southern part of the Presidency, it was suggested that the colonial authorities continue a pre-colonial practice and distribute native practitioners in the villages through grants in revenue. Finally, when cholera struck dramatically in south India from 1818 the colonial authorities resorted to extensive hiring of practitioners on a short-term basis. The variety of ways in which the colonial authorities came to terms with the native practitioner—from mainly dismissive accounts to praise of their usefulness in specific disease control—reminds us that we need to differentiate our understanding of the colonial encounter not only according to time and place but also according to administrative context.

An important branch in recent debates on the nature of the judiciary in colonial south India has focused on the extent
to which the judicial institutions—and the social transformations mediated through them—were controlled by the colonial state. This debate is of interest not only from the point of legal history. From the broader perspective of social and cultural history the debate is important because it draws attention to issues such as indigenous agency, conceptual negotiation and the hybrid nature of institutions under colonial rule. It is these issues I intend to address through an analysis of indigenous litigation in the Mayor's Court in late eighteenth-century Madras. The analysis falls in two parts. First, I analyse how indigenous agents availed themselves of the court, despite an official colonial policy of excluding disputes between Indians from its jurisdiction. In the second part, I focus on the ways in which the nature of property was contested and negotiated in complex dialogues between indigenous litigants and representatives of the colonial judiciary. Both parts of the analysis indicate that important aspects of the litigation in the Mayor's Court were largely beyond the control of the colonial authorities.

In the fifteen years following World War II more was done to combat tuberculosis than at any other time in world history. On every continent, hundreds of millions received the BCG (Bacillus Calmette Guérin) vaccine and millions more benefited from newly discovered antibiotics. TB research and attempts to control the disease knit together disparate populations and places as a network of experts and a matrix of ideas spread out across the globe linking the world through a common vaccine, a battery of antibiotics, and a knowledge network. Medicine became internationalized as organizations like the WHO and UNICEF began to see diseases as global problems and not solely the concern of individual countries.