[Reader-list] Rockefeller foundation urban healthcare sixth posting

[burton cleetus]

Dear friends,

The activities of the Rockefeller foundation was laid
on a society and state where social consciousness for
the implementation of healthcare had already been laid
down by the missionaries who considered Travancore
experience as a blueprint for the spread of
Christianity within the subcontinent. 

It was on the large-scale health care investments
carried out by the missionaries that Rockefeller
foundation laid the institutional structure for urban
healthcare in the late 1920’s. Among the requests
received from various states for assistance for
healthcare, the Rockefeller foundation sought to chose
Travancore for its sphere of activity. Though no
concrete reasons were given for the choice of the
land, it seems that the foundation’s considerations
were primarily guided by the fact that Travancore had
a relatively higher level of literacy and similar
human development indices that would in turn ensure
the successful implementation of western medical
paradigms in Travancore. In a recently held interview,
the President of the Foundation, Judith Rodin echoed
the considerations of the foundation behind guided
their philanthropic concerns. She argued, “...we
measure success by looking at impact. That is, if you
define your problem properly, then you can ask
yourself in a really sensible way, have we made a
difference? Have the beneficiaries been affected?” 

While vaccination and preventive measures against
diseases were introduced in a large scale by the
foundation, they focused on generating social consent
for hygiene and sanitation measure by educating the
people on waste management, against water logging, and
the need to have clean roads and by lanes etc. The
proponents of the foundation, like most of those who
set out to formulate urban healthcare were of the
realization that healthcare in its modern forms of
understanding has to be implemented through a
transformation in the behavioural patterns of the
indigenous societies. Urbanization meant that the
society had to be regulated and monitored to represent
the new forms of governance, as laboratories of the
new modes of governance.

In Travancore, the popularization of sanitary and
similar health care measures were laid down by the
Christian missionaries, who introduced hospitals ad
clinics during the mid nineteenth century. Education
and healthcare formed the two most important forms of
missionary intervention. They considered these as the
path towards the realization of their objective of
religious conversion. For the foundation, Travancore
provided the ideal socio-political and geographical
location for experimenting their medical and
philanthropic concerns. 

The extend to which initial missionary intervention
contributed to the generation of social consent for
the later day popularization of western medicine is
rarely explored. This was primarily for the fact that
studies pertaining to sanitation and healthcare had in
most circumstances overlooked the larger discourses
that shaped urban hygiene and sanitary measures.
Missionary perception on health sharply contrasted the
therapeutic practices of the indigenous societies. 
personal hygiene, cleanliness etc formed an important
part of missionary curricula. 
Regards
Burton





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