Special Treatment: Student Doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (South Asia in Motion)

"The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is iconic in the landscape of Indian healthcare. Established in the early years of independence, this enormous public teaching hospital rapidly gained fame for the high-quality treatment it offered at a nominal cost; at present, an average of ten thousand patients pass through the outpatient department each day. With its notorious medical program acceptance rate of less than 0.01%, AIIMS also sits at the apex of Indian medical education. To be trained as a doctor here is to be considered the best. In what way does this enduring reputation of excellence shape the institution's ethos? How does elite medical education sustain India's social hierarchies and the health inequalities entrenched within? In the first-ever ethnography of AIIMS, Anna Ruddock considers prestige as a byproduct of norms attached to ambition, aspiration, caste, and class in modern India, and illustrates how the institution's reputation affects its students' present experiences and future career choices. Ruddock untangles the threads of intellectual exceptionalism, social and power stratification, and health inequality that are woven into the health care taught and provided at AIIMS, asking what is lost when medicine is used not as a social equalizer, but as a means to cultivate and maintain prestige"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Contents 8 1 “AIIMS Is AIIMS” 12 2 The Beginning: Establishing AIIMS 34 3 Getting In: Being the Best 56 4 Being In: “Freedom” 93 5 Ways and Means of Learning: Impressions from the Clinic 127 6 Graduation: The Consequences of Excellence 164 7 Confronting Inequality: The Potential of Medical Education for India 203 Acknowledgments 214 Appendix: On Methodology 216 Notes 226 Bibliography 266 Index 286 A 286 B 286 C 287 D 287 E 288 F 288 G 289 H 289 I 289 J 290 K 290 L 290 M 290 N 291 O 291 P 291 R 291 S 292 T 292 U 293 V 293 W 293 Y 293 Z 293 The first ethnographic study of Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Special Treatment follows a group of students and explores how the institution's prestige is reproduced by powerful norms attached to ambition, aspiration, caste, class, and the role of medicine in society.