Unani medicine in the nineteenth-century public sphere

Abstract

Unani medicine’s encounter with Western medicine in nineteenth-century north India generated a rich corpus of Unani medical texts in the vernacular Urdu. A new Unani and a new hakim (practitioner of Unani) evolved with an emphasis less on the mastery of the theory and more on the practice of medicine. Urdu newspapers, particularly the Oudh Akhbar, pushed the issues generated by texts on Unani into the public sphere, and it was here that the inevitable tensions between the old family-centred Unani and the new hakim were fought out. Through an engagement with Western medicine in order to contain the threat posed by it, Unani dramatically reshaped and redefined itself as an Indian medical system.