The Gandhian Well-being II: How Gandhi imagined Medicine
Gandhi’s critique of modern medicine is situated within his larger critique of modern science and technology, which is an essential feature of the modern Western civilisation. The foundation of his philosophy rested on ethics attaining the highest pedestal. Ideas, philosophies, and actions had to tread the line of ethics in terms of motives, means, and consequences. If the motives were pure, so would be the means. And pure means would eventually ensure pure consequences. A self-devised concept of truth lay at the heart of Gandhi’s ethics, and as author David Hardiman points out, ‘Human ‘truths’ were for [Gandhi] contingent and contextual, being reached through experiment, praxis, debate and dialogue’ (Hardiman, 2009, p. 9).
These epistemological strategies were aimed to ensure that every individual was allowed what scholar Vivek Dhareshwar calls their ‘integrity of experience’ (Dhareshwar, 2010). In Gandhi’s critique we see an emphasis on how the supposed exploitative modes of modern Western civilisation — colonialism — sought to deny this very integrity of experience. By cognitively enslaving its subjects and making them see the world through its eyes, modern Western colonialism imposed its own ways of thinking and knowing, thus denying them the virtue of their own indigenous worldview and the experiences that flows from it. Consequently, rather than a civilisational interaction and negotiation about ideas and cultures, Western science, lifestyle, thought, and cognition is imposed upon other people and their universes.
As Gandhi himself clarified, ‘I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want all cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any’ (Gandhi 1966b, p. 159). As we’ll see in the rest of this essay, Gandhi wasn’t averse to appreciating modern science and its practitioners — determination and zeal for exploration and innovation did matter to him. However, when it came to its association with materialism and inhumanity, he had his problems.[i]
For some years now, scholars have started to look at Gandhi’s views on health and medicine more closely and with more nuance than before, challenging the rather monochromatic understanding of it by the preceding generations of scholars. The earlier narrative dictated that Gandhi derived his model of health from religious sources and from ancient Indian culture, and thought it to be intimately connected with other domains of life such as morality, politics, and social conduct. ‘Gandhi’s views on politics, religion, economics, and health form an inseparable whole…’ wrote academic Roderic C. Weaver (Weaver, 1979, p. 43). While this sketch regarding Gandhi’s views on health and medicine is reasonable, the argument that the foundation of Gandhi’s views on these matters lay in religious and pre-modern sources has been challenged.
Theorist Joseph Alter claims that Gandhi’s conception of health drew from both traditional and modern paradigms, and that it was largely ‘a science of his own creation’ (Alter, 1996, p. 320). However, what the broad scholarship on Gandhi’s views on health and medicine agrees upon is that for him, the nature of one’s engagement with the wider world was heavily dependent on one’s relationships with one’s body. This led Gandhi to give matters of health a significant amount of importance in his philosophy, even tethering it to his campaigns against untouchability, his aspirations for Swaraj, and his conception of satyagraha. This holistic view of health care not only drove Gandhi to adopt a self-devised system of naturopathy as an ideal system of care and cure, but also to critique allopathy for its often violent and atomistic methods. By adding an element of metaphysics to medicine, Gandhi could reasonably stress on the importance of soul, which he used to again critique Western biomedicine, alleging that it only looked at human body as a physiochemical vehicle, thus contributing ‘to the diminution of human dignity and self-control’ (Alter, 1996, p. 45).
In his 1909 text Hind Swaraj, Gandhi provides a biting critique of the Western medical profession. Turning its very purpose on its head, he argues that far from preventing any illnesses that may afflict the body, allopathic doctors ensure that a body is revisited by maladies so that they can profit from it again and again: ‘I have indulged in vice, I contract a disease, a doctor cures me, the odds are that I shall repeat the vice.’ If there had been no intervention on the part of the doctor, says Gandhi, ‘nature would’ve done its work, and I would’ve acquired mastery over myself…’ The sum total of this cycle is a compromise on swaraj, or self-control: ‘loss of control over the mind’, simply because ‘the doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself’ (Gandhi, 1938, p.51).[ii]
From doctors he moves on to hospitals, which are characterised as ‘institutions for propagating sin’. Here, European doctors, ‘the worst of all’, carry out vivisection and violate the religious sentiments of Hindus and Muslims by using medicine prepared from cow and pig fat. Worse, these doctors cheat poor Indians by charging an unfair fee, which only proves that they do ‘no real service of humanity’. The verdict? ‘To study European medicine is to deepen our slavery’ (pp. 51–52).
In a speech that he gave at the inauguration of a medical college in Delhi in 1921, Gandhi expressed his expectations in no uncertain terms: ‘I hope…that this college will be concerned chiefly with the prevention of diseases rather than with its cure.’ Noting his disapproval of the ‘divorce’ between religion and the ‘science of medicine’, he hoped that the institution ‘will witness a definite attempt on the part of the physicians to bring about a reunion between the body and the soul’ (Gandhi, 1966a, p. 357).
Drawing from ‘medical anthropology’ and the ideas of Michel Foucault, scholars P. Khatri and P.C. Joshi have argued that Gandhi’s primacy to prevention over cure indicated his genuine engagement with health. Bio-medicine, on the other hand, only concerns itself with the disease and abnormality of the human body. The profit-motive of the current economic order, coupled with practical corruption, has ensured that the cycle of disease-then-cure never ends. Worse, it has also led to the suppression, or a distorted co-option of indigenous systems of medicine into the globalised system (Khattri & Joshi, 2015).
Gandhi’s praxis was consistent with his intellectual setting. At the Tolstoy farm that he had set up in South Africa, doctors and allopathic drugs were banned (Arnold, 1993, p. 286). It was also in South Africa when his interest in ‘nature cure’ had peaked. Biographer Rajmohan Gandhi recounts how Gandhi once cured an ex-indentured Indian of asthma by making him quit tobacco and prescribing a special diet accompanied with sun baths. In another instance, when a two-year old son of the local stationmaster was suspected of contracting typhoid, Gandhi took to regulating the infant’s diet and applying cold mud poultice on his abdomen. It worked. ‘I made many such experiments on the farm,’ he later boasted, ‘and do not remember to have failed in even a single case’ (Gandhi, 2006, p.162).
When his own son Manilal came down heavily with typhoid and pneumonia in 1902, the father refused to allow Western doctors to attend to him, while also rejecting a diet of chicken and eggs recommended by ‘a very good’ Parsi doctor (p.100). The same would also apply to Kasturba almost four decades later. Stuck to her death bed after a series of heart attacks in Pune’s Aga Khan Palace, where the couple was jailed between 1942 and 1944, Gandhi refused to treat her with the penicillin that their son Devadas had managed to import, only allowing a nature cure expert and an Ayurveda specialist to see her (p. 514). Whereas Manilal had managed to recover, Kasturba did not.
However, it is not the case that Gandhi’s attitude towards Science itself was coloured with suspicion. He was capable of admiring Science and scientists, inasmuch as it dealt with their curiosity, humility, zeal, and discipline (Prasad, 2001, pp.371–3732).
In his speech in Delhi in 1921, Gandhi had also clarified that he had no beef with modern science as a discipline, but was instead suspicious of the causes that it had been made to serve: ‘I would like to pay my humble tribute to the spirit of research that fires the modern scientists. My quarrel is not against that spirit. My complaint is against the direction that the spirit had taken. It had chiefly concerned itself with the exploration of laws and methods conducting to the merely material advancement of its clientele. But I have nothing but praise for the zeal, industry and sacrifice that have animated the modern scientists in the pursuit of truth’.
Other scholars have also maintained that Gandhi’s criticisms of biomedicine do not emanate from the intrinsic nature of biomedicine itself, but from the ‘colonial mindset’ of individual doctors (Khattri and Joshi, 2015, p. 58).
Endnotes
[i] Addressing an assembly of students in Trivandrum in 1925, Gandhi remarked that to identify him as a foe of science was a ‘common superstition’. He made his oft-repeated distinction between Science-in-itself and Science tethered to material gains: ‘Many students go in for science not for the sake of knowledge but for the sake of livelihood that their scientific studies might give…If you go in for science in the right spirit then I know that there is nothing so great or so valuable for making us accurate in thought and accurate in action.’ (Gandhi, 1967, pp. 299–303).
[ii] In the Gujarati version of the same text, Gandhi went a step further and hinted that it was a physician that lay the first brick in the colonisation of India: “The pretensions of physicians also know no bounds. It was a British physician who played upon the credulity of the Moghul emperor. He was successful in treating an illness in the emperor’s family and was in consequence honoured. It was again a physician who ingratiated himself with the Ameer (of Afghanistan).” (Parel, 1997, p. 63 f116)
To read part 3, click here.
This essay is part of a four-part series on Gandhi’s conception of healthcare. You can read part 1.