The callous response to Dr Payal Tadvi’s suicide last year prompted me to write this piece. It’s an appeal to the medical profession in India to wake up to casteism in their midst before it is too late. The article was published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics on 23rd Nov 2020. The full… Continue reading Caste and casteism in medical education and training in India
During my almost six years at Pune’s Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Medical College, from where I graduated a decade ago, I never used the phrase ‘medical school.’ I also don’t remember anyone else using that term to describe any of India’s four hundred or so medical colleges. Recent years, however, tell a different story. Folks at a… Continue reading The time when we had medical colleges as well as medical schools – and the etiology of the MBBS degree
As I came to appreciate after countless hours in darkened lecture halls, the biomedical view of disease looks piercingly through a patient toward some essential, objective, solid reality of biology—and yet in doing so it loses, like an X ray, almost any sense of flesh of the person. – Chris Feudtner, ‘Bittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and… Continue reading Being a good ‘doctor’, not just a good ‘clinician’: Reading recommendations for MBBS students
Popular representations of medical systems, professionals, and of illness itself, are an important source of knowledge for historians of medicine. During my research into the history of the Indian (bio)medical profession in the post-independence period, I recently came across a very interesting short story, published in a Sunday edition of the Indian Express in October… Continue reading A riveting 1947 short story featuring India’s medical education system
CARING FOR INDIA 