"Who is medical education really for? What do medical schools actually teach? This quietly devastating study of India's 'best' medical school, and the 'best' students who attend it, reveals how good intentions and entrenched ideas about value and merit combine to produce fragmented, expensive, ill-distributed and disrespectfully delivered medical care. Special Treatment illuminates troubling patterns that extend well beyond contemporary India."—Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Special Treatment is a valuable, much-needed addition to the sparse body of ethnographic work on elite institutions of professional education. Anna Ruddock has crafted a sensitive and sympathetic—yet nuanced and critical—account of how the best-regarded doctors in the country are trained at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. This book overcomes the daunting difficulties of studying a powerful 'institution of excellence' and illuminates its functioning without descending into hagiography."—Satish Deshpande, Delhi University "Ruddock's description of the overcrowded out-patient departments at AIIMS; and the common (though not exclusive) attitude of the faculty and students that patients are 'interesting cases', with little understanding of the social context of disease and healing, will be familiar to medical students from any government college in the country... A single institution cannot be expected to change the medical culture in the entire country, as Ruddock says, yet it is sad that AIIMS has not used its privileged position to show the way."—George Thomas, The India Forum "Ruddock... convincingly demonstrates how AIIMS' narrow definition of excellence reproduces a hierarchy of medical practices in which general practice and primary care are devalued and a high premium is attached to superspecialised medicine in urban centres.... We are in need of more research that is as fine-grained and incisive as... Ruddock's [work], and which will also bring the domain of science itself into inquiry and critique."—Priya Ranjan, Social Change
