Today’s post features an image of the Hamdam Dawakhana (loosely translated as ‘Friendly Pharmacy’) from 1916. This image was published in the Urdu language Chashma -e-Hayat (Spring of Life) magazine edited by Dawakhana’s proprietor Hafiz Mohammed Dehlvi in the 1940s. It was a proponent of Unani and Tibb medicine and quite a popular one at that.
Located in Lal Kuan, the Hamdam Dawakhana was one of the ‘big’ pharmacies in early 20th century Shahjahanabad. The other more prolific competitor was the ‘Hamdard’ pharmacy which is still around and has gone from strength to strength in recent decades.
The magazine in which the image above was featured in is quite tattered but it does give us a sense of the bristling world in which questions about health and hygiene were being debated in Delhi and British India. Quiet presciently, it has sections on cigarette smoking (cigarette nushi) and the lungs and ‘propaganda’ against Tibb medicine for example. It’s pertinent to point out as historians have suggested, that such magazines (and Dawakhanas) weren’t just presenting ‘traditional’ wisdom on medicine but translating Unani and Tibb in a modern idiom for modern audiences.
The Hamdam Dawakhana was at the centre of this process.
See you next Friday.
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