This chapter traces the dissident therapeutic space limned in Gandhi’s accounts of his experiments with illness and nursing in South Africa and India. It contends that Gandhian nursing names a low key everyday praxis that pushes back against modern medicine and its aggressive construal of illness as emergency. Gandhi’s “quack” practice is a quieter, radically ad hoc, albeit risky, notion of care. Explicating these radical experiments in caregiving, the chapter carefully elaborates Gandhi’s philosophical rejection of modern medical practice. In parrying the thrust of colonial medical thought and practice, Gandhian “quackery” was, notably, uninterested in advocating for traditional Indian systems of medicine. The opposition to biomedicine (not always consistently held) calls to be read then as one element in a wider polemic against a range of biomoral problems: violence, inhospitality, and self-discipline, among others. Fostering notions of human wellbeing undergirded by the carnality of life in globalized industrial capitalism, modern medicine in Gandhi’s view was a symptom of the “disease of civilization” rather than a remedy for the suffering it caused. As his Autobiography and Hind Swaraj show, implicit in his rejection of conventional therapeutics was a critical conception of man as consumer, as too much the triumphal eating machine, ever at war via consumption with the animal world and the environment more broadly. Little wonder that dietetics constitutes the primary site where the emergency ethics of illness could be deflated and ethically rewritten as a prompt for non-violent quotidian action on the part of nurse and patient. Gandhi’s pharmacy included more than the question of diet and consumption, however. Nursing, this chapter shows, emerges as a form of constant but ever incomplete striving for an unconditional hospitality involving negation of the self for the other. Part of a decolonizing counternarrative that interrupted the enemy-creating imperative of biomedical rhetoric discussed in Chap. 6 , Gandhian hospitality entailed friendship to be sure. However, full of difficult paradoxes and risks, it remained untranslatable into a clear set of prescriptions or achieved acts of customary benevolence. While we are forced to conclude that his experimental willingness “to let die” self (and even other) cannot be readily or consistently (re)coded as a practical alternative available to all, still Gandhian “quackery” plays a salutary role in keeping medicine, in its colonial and postcolonial iterations, philosophically open and unsettled.

“The Quack Whom We Know”: Experiments in Nursing Hospitality

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发表日期：

2025年

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Sandhya Shetty

摘要

This chapter traces the dissident therapeutic space limned in Gandhi’s accounts of his experiments with illness and nursing in South Africa and India. It contends that Gandhian nursing names a low key everyday praxis that pushes back against modern medicine and its aggressive construal of illness as emergency. Gandhi’s “quack” practice is a quieter, radically ad hoc, albeit risky, notion of care. Explicating these radical experiments in caregiving, the chapter carefully elaborates Gandhi’s philosophical rejection of modern medical practice. In parrying the thrust of colonial medical thought and practice, Gandhian “quackery” was, notably, uninterested in advocating for traditional Indian systems of medicine. The opposition to biomedicine (not always consistently held) calls to be read then as one element in a wider polemic against a range of biomoral problems: violence, inhospitality, and self-discipline, among others. Fostering notions of human wellbeing undergirded by the carnality of life in globalized industrial capitalism, modern medicine in Gandhi’s view was a symptom of the “disease of civilization” rather than a remedy for the suffering it caused. As his Autobiography and Hind Swaraj show, implicit in his rejection of conventional therapeutics was a critical conception of man as consumer, as too much the triumphal eating machine, ever at war via consumption with the animal world and the environment more broadly. Little wonder that dietetics constitutes the primary site where the emergency ethics of illness could be deflated and ethically rewritten as a prompt for non-violent quotidian action on the part of nurse and patient. Gandhi’s pharmacy included more than the question of diet and consumption, however. Nursing, this chapter shows, emerges as a form of constant but ever incomplete striving for an unconditional hospitality involving negation of the self for the other. Part of a decolonizing counternarrative that interrupted the enemy-creating imperative of biomedical rhetoric discussed in Chap. 6 , Gandhian hospitality entailed friendship to be sure. However, full of difficult paradoxes and risks, it remained untranslatable into a clear set of prescriptions or achieved acts of customary benevolence. While we are forced to conclude that his experimental willingness “to let die” self (and even other) cannot be readily or consistently (re)coded as a practical alternative available to all, still Gandhian “quackery” plays a salutary role in keeping medicine, in its colonial and postcolonial iterations, philosophically open and unsettled.