The Doctor and the Saint

Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Haymarket Books+ORM
ISBN: 1608467988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
The little-known story of Gandhi’s reluctance to challenge the caste system, and the man who fought fiercely for India’s downtrodden. Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste, argues bestselling author and Booker Prize–winner Arundhati Roy—it has entrenched and modernized it. To understand caste today in India, Roy insists we must examine the influence of Gandhi in shaping what India ultimately became: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. Roy states that for more than a half century, Gandhi’s pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, Dalit “untouchables,” and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting, and he also refused to allow lower castes to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives. But there was someone else who had a larger vision of justice—a founding father of the republic and the chief architect of its constitution. In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy introduces us to this contemporary of Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, who challenged the thinking of the time and fought to promote not merely formal democracy, but liberation from the oppression, shame, and poverty imposed on millions of Indians by an archaic caste system. This is a fascinating and surprising look at two men—one of whom has become a worldwide symbol and the other of whom remains unfamiliar to most outside his native country. Praise for Arundhati Roy “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness.” —Junot Díaz “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker

The Doctor and the Saint

Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9353055156
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
To best understand and address the inequality in India today, Arundhati Roy insists we must examine both the political development and influence of M.K. Gandhi and why B.R. Ambedkar's brilliant challenge to his near-divine status was suppressed by India's elite. In Roy's analysis, we see that Ambedkar's fight for justice was systematically sidelined in favor of policies that reinforced caste, resulting in the current nation of India: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. This book situates Ambedkar's arguments in their vital historical context-namely, as an extended public political debate with Mohandas Gandhi. 'For more than half a century-throughout his adult life-[Gandhi's] pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, untouchables and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting,' writes Roy. 'His refusal to allow working-class people and untouchables to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives remained consistent too.' In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy exposes some uncomfortable, controversial, and even surprising truths about the political thought and career of India's most famous and most revered figure. In doing so she makes the case for why Ambedkar's revolutionary intellectual achievements must be resurrected, not only in India but throughout the world.

The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint

Author: Edward Swift
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480470430
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
DIVDIVThe magical saga of a remarkable family undone by madness, fate, and politics, and a dutiful daughter’s lifelong pursuit of righteous retribution/divDIV Josefina Esperon’s parents came to Latin America together, but with separate missions. Her father, Dr. Alejandro Esperon, sought to better humankind by harnessing the curative powers of tropical plants. His wife, the beautiful, pious, and quite mad Eufemia, came seeking sainthood. Josefina enjoyed a privileged childhood of plenty in a forty-three-room former convent, never lacking for companionship in a home filled with her father’s mistresses, including Josefina’s favorite, the great actress Carlota Montejo. But her idyll was undone when the vicious Serrano family seized power in paradise, and almost overnight, everything and everyone Josefina loved was ruthlessly destroyed. Now, at age eighty-two, having become wealthy and famous, Josefina is finally ready to enjoy what she has worked her entire life to achieve: revenge./divDIV A masterwork of magical realism from the acclaimed author of Splendora, Edward Swift’s The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint is a novel infused with color, mystery, and wonder. It is a tale brimming with tragic incident and triumphant resolution that stands proudly alongside the touchstone works of the genre./divDIV/div/div

Annihilation of Caste

Author: B.R. Ambedkar
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Book Description
“What the Communist Manifesto is to the capitalist world, Annihilation of Caste is to India.” —Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste The classic work of Indian Dalit politics, reframed with an extensive introduction by Arundathi Roy B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar – a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois – offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world’s best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation. The hatchet was never buried. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste in “The Doctor and the Saint,” examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy takes us to the beginning of Gandhi’s political career in South Africa, where his views on race, caste and imperialism were shaped. She tracks Ambedkar’s emergence as a major political figure in the national movement, and shows how his scholarship and intelligence illuminated a political struggle beset by sectarianism and obscurantism. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.

Not All of Us Are Saints

Author: David Hilfiker
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 080907401X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
The story of what it means for a middle-class white male physician to confront the health problems of ravaged ghetto communities.

Saint Giuseppe Moscati

Author: Antonio Tripodoro
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681496801
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
This is the compelling and ; inspirational true story of a twentieth-century doctor ; and saint. Giuseppe Moscati, born of an aristocratic family in Naples, Italy, ; devoted his medical career to serving the poor. He was also a medical school ; professor and a pioneer in the field of biochemistry, whose research led to the ; discovery of insulin as a cure for diabetes. Moscati regarded his medical ; practice as an apostolate, a ministry to his suffering fellowmen. Before examining ; a patient or engaging in research he would place himself in the presence of God. ; Moscati treated poor patients free of charge, and he would often send them home ; with an envelope containing a prescription and a fifty-lire note. He could have ; pursued a brilliant academic career, taken a professorial chair, and devoted more ; time to research, but he continued to serve his beloved patients and to train ; dedicated interns. By the witness of his example, he taught his many ; medical students to practice their profession in a spirit of service, saying that ; "suffering should be treated not as just pain of the body, but as the cry of a soul, ; to whom another brother, the doctor, runs with the ardent love of charity. . . [The ; sick] are the faces of Jesus Christ, and the Gospel precept urges us to love them ; as ourselves."

Saint Gianna Molla

Author: Pietro Molla
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681494159
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
This is the inspiring story of a canonized contemporary woman. Gianna Molla (1923-1962) risked her life in order to save her unborn child. Diagnosed with uterine tumors during her fourth pregnancy, she refused a hysterectomy that would have aborted the child, and opted for a riskier surgery in an attempt to save the baby. Herself a medical doctor, Molla did give birth to the child, but succumbed to an infection. An Italian woman who loved skiing, playing piano, attending concerts at the Milan Conservatory, Molla was a dedicated physician and devoted wife and mother who lived life to the fullest, yet generously risked death by cancer for the sake of her child. A unique story, co-authored by her own husband, with his deeply moving personal insights of the heroic witness, love, sacrifice and joy of his saintly wife. A woman for all times and walks of life, this moving account of the multi-faceted, selfless St. Gianna Molla, who made the ultimate sacrifice to save her unborn child, will be an inspiration to all readers. Illustrated "A woman of exceptional love, an outstanding wife and mother, Gianna Molla gave witness in her daily life to the demanding values of the Gospel." - Pope John Paul II

Doctor to the Resistance

Author: Hal Vaughan
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1574887734
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
Dr. Jack Jackson was the Paris physician of Hemingway and Fitzgerald

Medical Miracles

Author: Jacalyn Duffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019533650X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Physicianhistorian Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries. Overwhelmingly the miracles cited in canonizations between 1588 and 1999 are healings, and the majority entail medical care and physician testimony. These remarkable records contain intimate stories of illness, prayer, and treatment, as told by people who rarely leave traces: peasants and illiterates, men and women, old and young. A woman's breast tumor melts away; a man's wounds knit; a lame girl suddenly walks; a dead baby revives. Suspicious of wishful thinking or na ve enthusiasm, skeptical clergy shaped the inquiries to identify recoveries that remain unexplained by the best doctors of the era. The tales of healing are supplemented with substantial testimony from these physicians. Some elements of the miracles change through time. Duffin shows that doctors increase in number; new technologies are embraced quickly; diagnoses shift with altered capabilities. But other aspects of the miracles are stable. The narratives follow a dramatic structure, shaped by the formal questions asked of each witness and by perennial reactions to illness and healing. In this history, medicine and religion emerge as parallel endeavors aimed at deriving meaningful signs from particular instances of human distress -- signs to explain, alleviate, and console in confrontation with suffering and mortality. A lively, sweeping analysis of a fascinating set of records, this book also poses an exciting methodological challenge to historians: miracle stories are a vital source not only on the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people, but also on medical science and its practitioners.

Dalit Studies

Author: Ramnarayan S. Rawat
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
The contributors to this major intervention into Indian historiography trace the strategies through which Dalits have been marginalized as well as the ways Dalit intellectuals and leaders have shaped emancipatory politics in modern India. Moving beyond the anticolonialism/nationalism binary that dominates the study of India, the contributors assess the benefits of colonial modernity and place humiliation, dignity, and spatial exclusion at the center of Indian historiography. Several essays discuss the ways Dalits used the colonial courts and legislature to gain minority rights in the early twentieth century, while others highlight Dalit activism in social and religious spheres. The contributors also examine the struggle of contemporary middle-class Dalits to reconcile their caste and class, intercaste tensions among Sikhs, and the efforts by Dalit writers to challenge dominant constructions of secular and class-based citizenship while emphasizing the ongoing destructiveness of caste identity. In recovering the long history of Dalit struggles against caste violence, exclusion, and discrimination, Dalit Studies outlines a new agenda for the study of India, enabling a significant reconsideration of many of the Indian academy's core assumptions. Contributors: D. Shyam Babu, Laura Brueck, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Gopal Guru, Rajkumar Hans, Chinnaiah Jangam, Surinder Jodhka, P. Sanal Mohan, Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana