Poonam Bala is the author of Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective (Sage, 1992) and Medicine and Medical Policies in India: Social and Historical Perspectives (Lexington Books, 2007).

• Chapter 1 Introduction: Contested Ventures: Biomedicine in Colonial ContextsChapter 2 1. Colonizing Mother Egypt, Domesticating Egyptian MothersChapter 3 2. "Defying" Medical Autonomy: Indigenous Elites and Medicine in Colonial IndiaChapter 4 3. Medical Knowledge and Professional Power: From the Luso-Brazilian Context to Imperial BrazilChapter 5 4. The Invincible Generals: Disease and the Fight for Empire in Cuba, 1868 to 1898Chapter 6 5. The White Man in the Bedroom: Contraception and Resistance on Commercial Farms in Colonial RhodesiaChapter 7 6. Translations and Transformations: Toward Creating New Men in Early Twentieth-Century ChinaChapter 8 7. Rejected or Elected? Processes of Therapeutic Selection and Colonial Medicines in French Vietnam, 1905-39Chapter 9 8. Articulating Medical Ideas: Medicine and Medical Education in New SpainChapter 10 9. Disease, Doctors, and De beers Capitalists: Smallpox and Scandal in Colonial South Africa during the Mineral Revolution and British Imperialism, c. 1882-1883Chapter 11 10. Submitting to Surgery in the 1890s: Four Vignettes

Biomedicine as a Contested Site shows us the dialectics of power and knowledge in colonial societies of the past. Not only social historians will benefit from the insights provided by this book because its theme is highly relevant for understanding of contemporary medical pluralism in which biomedicine coexists with Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Just as in the past when indigenous medicines had to deal with the structural dominance of western medicine, the CAM practitioners of today walk a fine line between competition, accommodation, and resistance.