The constraints and opportunities of the health services of South Asia have fascinated me since 1971, when I carried out fieldwork in Lahore hospitals. My first book, The Politics of Health in India, published in 1988, was an attempt to understand better the origins of the situation I found there. The book used a ‘neo-Weberian’ perspective – understanding health systems by considering class as a framework that structures but does not fully determine them – for the period c1800-c1980. The book advanced the concept, among others, of ‘medical dependency’, derived from the more general dependencia approach to global inequalities.

Speaker: Roger Jeffery, University of Edinburgh and Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Nantes