Passive Patient Culture in India

Disrespect in Law and Medicine
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-367-65536-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 204 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Research in Health Law

In a society shaped by deep inequities, where healthcare and legal systems often reinforce class, caste, religion 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 everyday 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.

This book does more than engage in debates—it unsettles, disrupts, and insists on a reckoning with the entanglements of bioethics, medical sociology, and social justice. It speaks to those who refuse complacency, who seek the uneasy but necessary intersections of medical sociology, health services research, bioethics, social justice, and law—both in India and beyond.

This book is 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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Subramani, Supriya

Fachgebiete

• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Medizinrecht, Gesundheitsrecht
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Medizinische Ethik
• Rechtswissenschaften Öffentliches Recht Medizin- und Gesundheitsrecht
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Rechtsphilosophie, Rechtsethik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Copyright Permissions and Acknowledgements
To the Many Whom I Thank!
Preface- Finding Voice
Introduction- The Silent Struggle

Chapter 1: Situating Patienthood
Chapter 2: Rhetoric of Passive Patient in the Indian Legal Discourse
Chapter 3: Construction of Incompetent Patient
Chapter 4: Everyday Indignities: Institutionalising Passive Patienthood
Chapter 5: Towards Self-respect and Recognition in an Unequal World

Afterword- With Rage, Resistance and Hope: A Culture of Self-Respect
Appendix

Über Autor(innen)

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.