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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paul Winther is my uncle, November 28, 2007
Most research on opium during the nineteenth century has focused either on Britain or China. A good deal has been written on opium usage in Britain, as well as moral and medical attitudes towards the substance, and the history of Anglo-Chinese political and economic relationships generally give a prominent place to opium and its wars. Britain and China were primarily consumers during the century, and until late on, most of the drug came from India. By the 1890s, more poppies were being grown in China and the Middle East, and the market share enjoyed by Indian producers was being challenged.
Paul C. Winther's decision to concentrate his research on India is thus to be applauded, as is his exposition of debates about the value of opium as a protective and possible cure for cases of malaria. As he points out, the "malaria" diagnosis during his period was vague, and included many fevers that were subsequently differentiated, on the basis of subtly different clinical courses and a variety of specific causative agents. The malaria and opium nexus is consequently extremely tenuous, and nineteenth-century judgments about the drug's role in treating fevers were a heady mix of moral, economic, and psychological factors.
For readers like myself with a vested interest in his particular theme, Winther has much to offer. He has read widely and offers full descriptions of a number of works relevant to the topic. Almost half of the book is devoted to the evidence collected by the 1894 Royal Commission on Opium. He shows how the seven volumes of evidence and conclusions were collected and analysed, concentrating especially on the key medical member of the Commission, Sir William Roberts, a prominent Manchester physician. The Commission took evidence from a wide variety of witnesses, British as well as Indian, and they heard an equally wide variety of opinion, about the extent of opium use in India, as well as its medical value. Given the Government of India's need for the revenues from the drug, both as a source of export income and as a tidy profit from home sales (the Government controlled most production), the Committee's recommendation that the opium trade be continued is hardly surprising. Whether the Committee was convened simply to pacify the increasingly vocal activities of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade is another matter.
Winther implies that there was collusion and deliberate selection of testimony favourable to the economic interests of the Government of India. The evidence, as presented here, is less compelling. Roberts certainly interpreted the evidence with which he had been presented to conclude that the medical value of opium was such that a prohibition on its sale (and export) would be unjustified. In addition, he drew on two earlier studies that purported to demonstrate the value of opium as an effective drug against malaria. Using hindsight, it is easy for Winther to show that these clinical studies were rather inconclusive and faulty. In his eagerness to condemn Roberts, Winther uses modern criteria of clinical evaluation, and at one point castigates Roberts for not being aware of Ronald Ross's researches on the mode of transmission of malaria. Given the fact that Roberts was writing two years before Ross published anything on the subject, this is historical hindsight with a vengeance.
Winther's study is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the Indian dimension of opium production and use. Its value to students of the history of malaria is less clear. He has uncovered some salient debates on the relative merits of opium and quinine in cases of "fever," but his trawling of the literature on fevers in nineteenth-century India is selective, and opium featured much less in this literature that an uncritical reading of this monograph would suggest.
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