Medical marketplaces beyond the west: Bazaar medicine, trade and the English establishment in eighteenth-century India

Abstract

The theme of the medical marketplace has emerged as an important component of the history of medicine of early modern Europe. It has highlighted various aspects of the social and economic organization of health care there, including the commercialization of medical practice, competition between practitioners and the restructuring of professional hierarchies. Yet, this commercialization of medicine has so far been explored only within the problematic of European social and economic history, despite the fact that the experiences of trade with the Empire, of its markets, ports, bazaars and emporia formed a unique and important part of the commercial history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.