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The article discusses three methods of combining biomedicine with traditional medicine in pre-Independence Madras State in India, with comparative examples drawn from ethnographic studies in South India in the 1990s. In the mid to late 1920s, two officers of modern medicine from the Madras presidency were delegated to be trained in the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine to investigate the properties of the indigenous drugs of India using laboratory and physiological techniques. In the 1930s, Srinivasamurti, the first principal of the Government School of Indian Medicine in Madras, trialed a collaborative approach between clinical practitioners of ayurveda, siddha, and unani, and allopathic medical registrars with the ideal of developing a universal and synthetic textbook encompassing all medical systems on an equal setting. In the 1940s, a traditional practitioner was permitted to practice bone setting in the Government Hospital of Indian Medicine in Madras. These examples illustrate various dimensions of asymmetric relations between traditional and modern medicine in twentieth- and twenty-first-century India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Varmakkalai, 'the art of the vital spots', combines therapeutic and martial techniques: Varmam spots are of combative relevance, but also applicable in curing ailments. This paper depicts how far this South Indian practice figures simultaneously in the kaḷari, the training ground where combat techniques called varma aṭi, 'hitting the vital spots', are taught, and in the vaittiyacdlai, the dispensary for varma maruttuvam, 'vital spot treatments'. Injuries incurred in the kaḷari are addressed in the vaittiyacāai, and apprentices' learning progress in one surrounding can be measured by their prowess in the other. Both physical and mental skills acquired combine in a kind of psycho-somatic intuition--the medical and martial competence of practitioners. Such intersections of medicine and martial practices are not normally recognised by 'Western' taxonomies or educational models, which tend to segregate such aspects, labelling one as 'arts' or 'sports' and the other as 'science'. However, this paper describes the very combination of medically and martially relevant aspects of varmam as not only complementary, but as the most decisive feature of varmakkalai. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]