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Indigenous and Western Medicine in Colonial India by Madhuri Sharma (review)

in older plague literature. The authors’ recurrent claim that “the Ottoman Empire did not apply any plague laws” (236) is at odds with recent work that questions traditional historiographical assumptions about the spread of plague around the Mediterranean (see, for example, the inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe). Jane Stevens Crawshaw’s work on sixteenth-century Venetian public health (Plague Hospitals, Ashgate, 2012) would have provided a very useful comparison for the exploration of street-level plague management. It is also unfortunate that the authors could not situate their analysis of the last epidemic more solidly within the larger historical contexts of the Italian Wars and the Christians’ rapidly collapsing control of the eastern Mediterranean. As a whole, however, Expelling the Plague provides a comprehensive and intriguing analysis, as well as access to an incredibly valuable set of largely untapped primary sources. This timely book will benefit a wide range of historians. More than a study of quarantine and the creation of the first recorded Health Office in 1377, it illuminates the inner workings of a unique city as it struggled to prevent successive plague outbreaks from undoing its economic, political, and social vitality, cohesion, and independence.