The volume explores the history of medical science and institutions in South Asia during the colonial period. It questions the foundational categories that have come to define the medical science. Colonial enlightenment established a hierarchy between what could be considered medical science and the practice outside this. Consequently all non-Western methods of healing were relegated to the status of "non-science." These contributions in the volume seek to displace this easy privileging of the colonial and the Western and investigate the numerous extant indigenous forms of healing.