Passive Patient Culture in India: Disrespect in Law and Medicine

In a society shaped by deep inequalities, where healthcare and legal systems often reinforce class, caste, and gender hierarchies, this book offers a powerful examination of patienthood in India.

This book critiques the archetype of the ＂passive patient＂ entrenched in both medicine and law in India-an image that undermines agency, diminishes self-respect, and sustains a culture of disrespect. Chapters of the book unpacks the intersections of power, social categories, and patienthood, exposing how marginalized communities face routine indignities in healthcare and law. It explores law and medicine’s role in maintaining presumed ＂passive patient＂ archetype, especially through legal judgements and healthcare encounters. This book advocates for reimagining patienthood as centered on self-respect, recognition, and agency, arguing that the ＂passive patient＂ is not an isolated phenomenon but an outcome of broader, oppressive structures.

Contributing to robust debates in medical ethics, medical sociology, bioethics, and social justice, this book is essential reading for those interested in the intersections of medical sociology, applied ethics, health services research, social justice, bioethics and law.

Chapters Introduction and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Supriya Subramani is Lecturer at Sydney Health Ethics, School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney. She explores morality, behaviour, and attitudes in healthcare contexts. She employs ethnographic and phenomenological methods, adopting an interdisciplinary approach, to study moral emotions, such as humiliation, and moral concepts, including respect, othering, and belonging. Her current projects focus on migrant health and belonging, chronic pain, and epistemological and methodological questions concerning the relationship between emotions, self, other, and knowledge production.