Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on fieldwork at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, this paper demonstrates the value of anthropology for understanding India’s premier public hospital as both insulated from and permeated by the social and political context beyond its walls.

Paper long abstract:

Established through an act of parliament in 1956, with a focus on research, training, and care, AIIMS was intended above all to ensure India's self-sufficiency in medical human resources. In this paper, I reflect on recent PhD fieldwork to emphasise the indispensability of anthropological study for understanding India's premier public hospital - the institution, its patients, doctors, and students - as both insulated from and permeated by the social and political context beyond its walls.

In particular, I demonstrate how the multidimensional nature of anthropological research is essential to my troubling of narratives about a crisis of medical human resources in India. By drawing on ethnographic insight to give flesh and personal identity to these "resources" in the form of MBBS students at AIIMS, I am able to humanise them and access the influences both within and beyond the institution that inform their perceptions of healthcare in India, and their career aspirations.

I acknowledge a concern about the predominant ambition to practise super-specialised, urban medicine, despite a decline in family medicine provision, and a pressing need for primary and secondary care physicians outside the cities. However, I rely on ethnography to illuminate a textured understanding of the ways in which social norms, institutional myopia, and the historical neglect of public healthcare in India combine to preclude visions of alternative futures for many undergraduates. In doing so, I stress that any people-centred health system must humanise its human resources, and that a vital role exists for anthropology in this endeavour.