Doctor sahab: Doctors and the public in the ‘golden era’ of the Indian medical profession

Abstract

This essay analyses and historicises a contemporary dominant narrative among India’s biomedical doctors, that the early post‐independence period (1940s–1970s) was characterised by immense public trust and confidence in the biomedical profession, with the patient‐doctor relationship experiencing a ‘golden era’. By exploring people’s experiences with and perceptions of doctors during these decades, I show that contrary to contemporary understanding, public dissatisfaction with doctors was substantial even in the early post‐independence period. I argue that the dominance of privileged‐caste and ‐class Indians in the medical profession nurtured a caste privilege‐based elitist outlook within the mainstream profession and its leadership and created an insurmountable socioeconomic distance between doctors and the large majority of the public. What doctors deemed as people’s ‘trust’ in them and their profession was often simply a manifestation of people’s general deference towards the elites of the society. This incorrect interpretation of patient‐doctor dynamics in the past has been a constant feature of mainstream narratives around the doctor‐society relationship in post‐independence India and has remained largely under‐explored and under‐historicised in the medical, scholarly and public discourses.

Changes of heart: Debating the role of cardiology and cardiac surgery in India, 1948–1968

“…This priority is easy to understand. Many public hospitals in India struggled with under-funding, over-crowding and patient dissatisfaction; few could invest in advancing the frontiers of knowledge (Kumbhar, 2022(Kumbhar, , 2023. In 1962 BMC affirmed its intent to fund the faculty but cited a 'dearth of adequately qualified and experienced personnel' (Sastry, 1962).…”

The historical sociology of medicine in India: Introduction to the special section

“…Kiran Kumbhar addresses the narrative, beloved of doctors in India, which traces a decline in their respect from a supposed halcyon period in the 1950s and 1960s to a current situation characterised by threats and disrespect (Kumbhar, 2024). He shows that evidence for this rose‐tinted view of the past could be generated only by relying on the voices of solely elite urban educated patients, since biomedical doctors were notable by their absence from urban lower‐class settings and most of rural India.…”