Scourge of Sitala: Small Pox Mortality in Colonial Bengal: A Statistical Analysis for the Year 1926

Abstract

As the Europeans settled in the coasts of India, penetrated the interiors and colonized the land, they were frequently struck down with many tropical diseases. One amongst those which affected them dearly was the like Small Pox virus. Small Pox occupied an acrid place in the history of European medical ideas and practices in the 19^th century India. With the takeover of the Empire by the Crown in 1858, army health became the prime concern of the colonial policy.1 David Arnold in his ‘Colonising the Body; State, Medicine and Epidemic Disease in19^th C India’, had stated that disease was a potent factor in the European conceptualisation of indigenous society. Mark Harrison in his ‘Public Health in British India: Anglo Indian Preventive Medicine’ had explored on the theoretical and administrative aspects of Anglo-Indian preventive medicines in association with various diseases which the indigenous population faced. Poonam Bala in her ‘Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal: a Socio-Historical Perspective’ had discussed on the different facets of the establishment of the European medicine in colonial Bengal. Epidemics caused massive fatality among the European Army. The British physicians in the 19^th Century ranked Small Pox among the most prevalent and destructive of all epidemic diseases. Small Pox accounted for several million deaths in the 19^th Century alone amounting on average to more than one hundred thousand fatal cases a year.² This paper intends to explore the mortality picture of Bengal during the year 1926. In the process, detailed discussion would be undertaken to highlight the mortality rate among infants and how the disease affected the health of the children in colonial Bengal during 1926.