"Surgical Instruments of Indian “oculists” in the late 19th and early 20th Century"
The Karl Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine in Leipzig houses a collection of Indian surgical instruments donated by the Indologist A.F. Rudolf Hoernle between 1907 and 1913. The subject of this talk is a part of this collection that supposedly belonged to “two practicing Indian oculists from Benares” and their provenance. Unfortunately, there are no textual sources written by these oculists, who, according to the colonial discourse about them, were largely illiterate. The primary textual sources on these subaltern health practitioners are publications by Indian Medical Service doctors, who primarily viewed them as both unwanted competition as well as a public health hazard. According to these sources, they were commonly called suttiah or vaidya and were hereditary practitioners who almost exclusively practiced the couching of catharact.
While there are no written sources on these oculists their instruments have been collected both at the KSI as well as in various UK collections. I will therefore attempt to develop a closer understanding of the social position these so-called ‘oculists’ occupied by closely examining the material sources available. What becomes apparent is that the collected instruments contain not only those that were used for couching but also those used for other medical procedures unrelated to opthalmics. Furthermore, a significant number of instruments are quite evidently of Western manufacture, hinting at a complex entanglement between colonial and indigenous healing practices.
