I downloaded this from my library's ebook collection because of Suzanne's non-fiction challenge. This month it's science and technology, and this includes medicine. I suspect you could fit this book into a lot of other categories too (travel writing, belief, social justice?). The author is a science writer based in London, but writes that she considered herself an outsider despite her mother's background in India and her father's in the Trinidadian Indian community. She opens with a quote from Proust about keeping your eyes open to new experiences and it's this attitude that I enjoyed in the book. She travelled across India, from glamorous urban plastic surgery clinics that cater to the stars of Bollywood to observing the work of rural trained medics in villages dealing with the threats of guerrillas. Medical challenges are placed in the context of social history and that of the place - so in accompanying a traditional user of medicinal plants, the history of an area once colonised by the Portuguese, leaving accounts of research into the medicines traded internationally (that can even be supported with Ancient Greek underwater archaeology, showing medics in BCE carrying tablets based on Indian plants).

It was fascinating to read of the Indian government's support for other medical traditions, and the ways that this may be used to combat the real shortages of medics willing to work in rural areas. Perhaps most inspiring and hopeful were the initiatives that are changing world medicine, from programmes training women unable to access hospital care before and after they have a baby (rather than just focusing on healthy delivery) to a doctor using MRI scans to learn about how we see (and in the process getting funding for children's cataract operations). Great book. ( )