Claiming Manoobai Chand’s Body: Dissection, Labor and Science in Colonial India

Event Description 

In 1912, Annette Benson, a campaigner for medical women's rights in India and the Superintendent of Cama Hospital, Bombay, dissected the body of Manoobai Chand. Chand, a twenty-year-old Muslim woman, had died of dysentery after several months at the hospital. Chand was Muslim, a fact that would typically mean her body would be claimed by a local charity, but the hospital marked her as a "mendicant" with no family, and an "unclaimed body."

Benson, however, justified her actions by stating she wanted to uncover the roots of Chand's ailment, invoking "the plea of science," even though she knew Manoobai's body was not genuinely unclaimed. The local charity protested outside the hospital, prompting the Government of Bombay to launch an investigation. This investigation was eventually abandoned, and in 1913, Benson became a successful founding member of the Women's Medical Service in India. This raises a critical question: Where can we situate Manoobai Chand's body within Benson's struggles and efforts for medical women in India?

Drawing from the transcripts of this 1912-1913 investigation, this lecture maps the relationship between Benson and Chand. A study of their intertwined lives raises critical questions about the blurry boundaries between value and labor, opening new conversations between labor history and the history of science. The lecture demonstrates how anatomical examination was only possible when state regulations and scientific authority deemed certain bodies valuable. Such value, in turn, was only possible if those bodies were deemed unproductive in life, often based on the denial of labor of those who performed caste and gender based stigmatized and undervalued work. Anatomical practice, then, depended on whose body could perform scientific labor and whose body could become an object of scientific value.

Event Speaker

Sohini Chattopadhyay, Assistant Professor of History at Union College

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or historyofscience@nyu.edu for questions. 

This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The New York Academy of Sciences

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