In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room Read Free

inspirational individuals, there remains a long way to go before the ambition of that first government of modern India – state-supported healthcare for all – is realised. But if India is to achieve its full potential, it is a goal that remains vital: in one of the greatest nations on earth, the provision of world-class healthcare for all should be a major plank of government policy, not about philanthropy or ethics, or dependent on the goodwill of pioneering individuals. As an NHS colleague in London said to me – there is actually a strong economic case to be made as well. It is quite simply economic folly for a country to sacrifice its largest resource – its people – to ill health, poor nutrition and inadequate medical education.
    Though I spent a good part of my childhood in India, hold an OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) card and was born to an Indian mother raised in Delhi and a Trinidadian father whose own father was taken into British indentured service from Uttar Pradesh, the stories in this book are still based on the observations of an outsider (though I think I have come to the conclusion that everyone is an outsider to some part of their own country, and even within their own cities). After completing my interviews for this book’s final chapter, heavy-hearted to be leaving, I thought of something surgeon Dr Umang Mathur told me as I left the Dr Shroff Charity Eye Hospital in Delhi: ‘India is everything they say it is,’ he said, ‘and nothing.’
    Still, with an outsider’s eyes, even in a familiar landscape, sometimes you find the most wonderful stories in unexpected places. And so, ultimately, this is a book about how people in India approach health. It places centre stage stories of Indians in the business of healing – from the forefront of cutting-edge medical science to traditional street-corner pharmacies dealing with all manner of diseases by all manner of means – all hoping to deliver a cure. In researching it, I have spent time with healers and with patients, finding out who they turn to and why. The projects I have covered and doctors I interviewed were chosen for a variety of reasons. Some were pioneers in their fields; others attracted celebrity clientele. Several have been powerful catalysts for change, or have long family histories of medical practice. Yet others are passionate folk practitioners who fuse ancient tradition with modern technology, or command vast numbers of patients who place their trust in them despite knowing little about the treatment they receive.
    My aim was to allow characters and their stories to speak for themselves, vibrant snapshots of health and disease – both inside a rapidly changing nation and in the work of its diaspora, who have long comprised a disproportionately large percentage of doctors and scientists across the world.
    Detailing the entire breadth and diversity of the practice of medicine in India is clearly beyond the scope of any single volume. For every individual research centre or hospital whose story I relate, there are hundreds of others whose narrative remains to be told. India has a long history of iconic, brilliant scientific and medical minds. Its interaction with the wider world, in the provision of knowledge, doctors or scientific or scholarly exchange, go back millennia. The archaeology of the sub-continent is increasingly uncovering Indian innovation, reaching far into its pre-history, and so there are an almost uncapturable number of tales to tell. I would encourage everyone to continue to explore, engage and collect the wisdom and wealth of human story this great country affords. Within the chapters that follow, my aim was to capture and curate a selection of stories that I found to reflect the experience of people from different socio-economic groups, from the educated to the illiterate, cities to forests, superstition to hard science. In India’s rapidly changing landscape, any