The Luso Indian Stethoscope

A pioneering group of new medicos from along Konkan Coast the played an important role in annals Western medicine in nineteenth-century when the then fledgling Grant Medical College in Bombay provided them with new route and springboard into the Hospitals and Medical Practices of British India.

Shirley Louise Gonsalves writes about the group she researched, “I refer to them as Luso-Indians as I feel the term includes members of all the different communities included in this book. Some writers have used the word Luso-Indian to describe the Portuguese population in Portuguese India but I have chosen to use it in a broader sense. Therefore, for the purpose of this research, ‘Luso-Indian’ refers to indigenous Indians from the west coast of India whose ancestors were ruled for a period by the Portuguese and had converted to Catholicism”

Who were these new Medical Doctors? What was the intellectual milieu in Bombay during the nineteenth century? What broader social issues did they have to confront? Did women play any role in the field? The author digs up a forgotten, or unrecognized past.

This book explores the early experiences and traces the careers of this elite group of medical men and women largely Christians from Goa and Bombay.