Typhoid, Dr Gupta declared, with something of a flourish. As the sweat poured off my brow, I stared up from the hospital bed with relief and, to be honest, a hint of pride. Of all the lurgies he’d been testing for over the last three days, typhoid was by far the most glamorous.

“How Victorian!” commented one friend. I imagined myself lying under a mosquito net in a canvas tent, military uniform unbuttoned at the chest, Bible clasped to my heart. Fortunately – if less romantically – I found myself clutching an Indian Hello! magazine in an immaculate, air-conditioned private room at the Apollo Hospital in Delhi.

Many Westerners still wince at the thought of Indian medical care. But the Apollo is not just one of India’s best private hospitals: it is a leading centre for medical tourism, attracting patients from all around the world, not least Britain.

It’s easy to see why. For a start, most of the consultants are ex-NHS – you can tell where they worked from their English accents. The facilities make most British hospitals look Dickensian. And the prices are mind-bogglingly low. Excluding the room, my ten days’ intensive treatment, including X-rays, ultrasound, intravenous antibiotics and round-the-clock nursing cost £200.

But medical tourists beware: with Indian prices come Indian quirks. First, there are the crowds – not of patients, but their relatives. The entrance feels more like a railway station than a hospital. When I was admitted, I couldn’t understand why the nurses looked at me with such pity, muttering “all alone” under their breath. Then I peeked into some other rooms and saw entire extended families camped out.

Another quirk is the social hierarchy within the hospital, where caste and class become intertwined with formal rank. The consultants are at the top – English-speaking, Western-trained and with the easy charm of the upper castes and classes. “Don’t worry,” Dr Gupta would say. “We’ll have you shipshape and right as rain in a jiffy.” Next come the junior doctors – higher caste but middle-class, locally trained and unjustifiably arrogant, lording it over nurses and patients alike. “So, how’s your sickness?” one asked vaguely. “Got a fever?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps you should read my chart?”

The nurses, near the bottom of the pile, were dedicated and hard-working. But being mostly from poor, lower caste families, which have limited access to education, they had only a few words of English and rudimentary training.

I lost count of how often they missed veins giving injections. They would also rinse water glasses in unfiltered tap water – the likely source of the typhoid.

I cannot complain, though. Within two weeks, I’d recovered. And had I been in London, an army of medical students would have poked and prodded me around the Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

Glamorous typhoid is not. But if you must get it, the Apollo’s probably the best place in the world to be.

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