South Asian Studies Council, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Sociol Health Illn. 2024 Jun;46(5):815-830. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.13630. Epub 2023 Mar 10.
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.
本文分析并追溯了印度生物医学医生中一种当代占主导地位的叙事，即独立后早期（20 世纪 40 年代至 70 年代），公众对生物医学专业有着巨大的信任和信心，医患关系经历了“黄金时代”。通过探索人们在这几十年中的就医经历和对医生的看法，我表明，与当代的理解相反，即使在独立后早期，公众对医生的不满也是相当大的。我认为，印度种姓和阶级特权阶层在医疗行业的主导地位，在主流行业及其领导层中培育了一种基于种姓特权的精英主义观点，并在医生和大多数公众之间造成了不可逾越的社会经济差距。医生认为是人们对他们和他们的职业的“信任”，往往只是人们对社会精英的普遍尊重的表现。这种对过去医患动态的错误解读一直是印度独立后医生与社会关系的主流叙事的一个特征，在医学、学术和公共话语中，这种解读在很大程度上仍未得到充分探讨和历史化。
