This week I read an interesting article by the historian of medicine, Projit Mukharji, about the use of cats in anti-plague measures across the British Empire. The idea was developed by an imperial medical official in British India called Andrew Buchanan and he expounded it widely from 1907. He was inspired by his experiences serving…
Tag: Mandalay
Musical Roads to Mandalay
Buried under dissertation marking, I have neglected my blog a little, so here is a short one before I go back to the grindstone. These are two very different musical versions of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’. The first was performed in Britain in the 1930s by Robert Easton (apologies for the terrible sound quality). The…
Plague and Photography in Colonial Burma
I recently stumbled across some fascinating photographs of colonial measures taken to arrest the spread of bubonic plague in Mandalay in 1906 through the online archive of medical history images available through the Wellcome Trust, London. These photographs show Burmese residents apparently willingly submitting themselves to British medicine. In the top photo a group are…
Colonizing Animals 