”Without racism there would be no geriatrics’, in South Asian overseas-trained doctors and the development of geriatric medicine in the United Kingdom, 1950-2000”’

There has been a long history of migration of doctors from the colonies to the United Kingdom. Records of medical migration show that the practice of moving in order to study in the United Kingdom began at least in the 1840s and kept pace throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and South Asians accounted for a significant part of this migration. Those who taught medicine in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka had often trained in the United Kingdom for some time. As a result, many doctors in South Asia felt that they were part of a community of medical practitioners for whom some markers of participation in the U.K. labour market were central to career progression. They had often been advised by their teachers to get training in the United Kingdom. Upgrading and validating skills through training at one of the U.K. royal colleges was therefore seen as crucial to being recognized as a good doctor and was embedded in South Asian doctors’ professional cultures. Organizations like the royal colleges implicitly shaped migration (and indeed directly benefit financially from it) through their ability to award internationally accredited professional qualifications that were prestigious across the Commonwealth. As a result, many doctors in South Asia were already in some way part of a professional community where migration to the United Kingdom was seen as part of career progression. The South Asian doctors were not alone, of course. The history of colonialism and postcolonialism meant that doctors from other parts of the British Empire and Commonwealth were similarly leaving home to gain qualifications in the United Kingdom’s medical system, though with different experiences and outcomes, as Armstrong’s research shows