Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

New Potions in Old Bottles: Explaining the Differential Control of Disease in Nineteenth century Canton and Calcutta

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

12:00pm – 2:00pm

Peter Green House 104

Please RSVP by Monday, April 24th by 5:00pm to cynthia_brokaw@brown.edu

Lunch will be served.

Please join us for a talk by Prerna Singh about her research on disease control in China and India at the next meeting of the East Asia Colloquium

Disease itself respects no boundaries. Yet polities with similar epidemiological, socioeconomic and demographic conditions, have had strikingly different levels of effectiveness in countering equivalently severe challenges posed by particular diseases. I seek to explore this puzzle through a comparative historical analysis of the attempts to control what is believed to be the deadliest disease to afflict mankind, smallpox, in the two matched coastal cities of Calcutta and Canton.