{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T15:40:20Z","timestamp":1785426020382,"version":"3.56.0"},"reference-count":40,"publisher":"Cambridge University Press (CUP)","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,24]],"date-time":"2026-04-24T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1776988800000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["cambridge.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Med. Hist."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2026,7]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract<\/jats:title>\n                  <jats:p>The 1896 Bombay plague outbreak prompted the colonial government to recruit trained British nurses from England to serve the afflicted Indians of the Presidency. Studying this relatively under-explored aspect of British colonial nursing, this paper examines the politics of representation of the Western, non-military nurses serving the colonised Other through nineteenth-century periodical accounts and personal letters of a nurse stationed in Bombay. Owing to the popularity of British periodicals and the significant role they played in shaping public debates in the Metropole, periodical plague literature portrayed Western nurses as spokespersons for the Empire\u2019s benevolent rule in Bombay. Contrarily, the intimacy and confidentiality of letter-writing allowed nurses to offer a more nuanced and critical account of life and work in Bombay. The paper contends that the non-military Western nurse\u2019s medical career, mobility, and financial stability framed her multidimensional identity, which was further defined by the intersecting issues of race, class, gender and culture she encountered in Bombay. Comparing their varied portrayals in the periodicals and the letters, the paper argues that the politics of representation of women\u2019s lives were influenced by both their sociopolitical subjectivities and the narrative forms through which they articulated their experiences.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/mdh.2026.10061","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,24]],"date-time":"2026-04-24T05:09:32Z","timestamp":1777007372000},"page":"346-366","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/policypage","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Nursing the colonised: the politics of representation of the Western nurse in plague-stricken Bombay"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"70","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-1547-7609","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Rinu","family":"Koshy","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/02qyf5152","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}],"name":"Indian Institute of Technology Bombay"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref5","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.2307\/j.ctt18dzrdn.8"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref30","first-page":"177","volume-title":"Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance","author":"Birkett","year":"1992"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref24","first-page":"128","volume-title":"Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times","author":"Arnold","year":"2021"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref23","first-page":"29","article-title":"The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin\u2019s Fund, 1885-1888","volume":"68","author":"Lal","year":"1994","journal-title":"Bulletin of the History of Medicine"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref13","first-page":"76","volume-title":"The Bombay Plague: Being a History of the Progress of Plague in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 to June 1899","author":"Condon","year":"1900"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref12","first-page":"3","volume-title":"Report on the Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896-97-Vol 1","author":"Gatacre","year":"1897"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref8","first-page":"203","volume-title":"Epidemics and Ideas","author":"Chandavarkar","year":"1995"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref39","first-page":"85","volume-title":"The Rhetoric of English India","author":"Suleri","year":"1996"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref31","first-page":"213","volume-title":"Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-century India","author":"Arnold","year":"1993"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref25","first-page":"16","volume-title":"Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press","author":"Codell","year":"2003"},{"key":"S0025727326100611_ref37","first-page":"2","volume-title":"Women Writing Home: 1700-1920: Female Correspondence Across the British 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2026. Published by Cambridge University Press","name":"copyright","label":"Copyright","group":{"name":"copyright_and_licensing","label":"Copyright and Licensing"}},{"value":"This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.","name":"license","label":"License","group":{"name":"copyright_and_licensing","label":"Copyright and Licensing"}},{"value":"This content has been made available to all.","name":"free","label":"Free to read"}]}}