Khan is now the most common surname for doctors in Britain. It is followed by Patel, also from the Indian sub-continent, ahead of the plain English names Smith and Jones. Ahmed is in sixth place and Ali is ninth.
The figures, extracted from the General Medical Council’s register, reflect the depth of the contribution to Britain’s health from doctors whose families originated in the Commonwealth.
According to the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, there were only 1,000 Indian doctors in the National Health Service in 1948 when it was founded. Today there are 40,000 from the sub-continent.
GMC statistics show that more than a fifth of doctors are ethnically Asian. This high figure is likely to include a substantial proportion of British-born Asians.
The ethnic breakdown of doctors includes 2.6 per cent Africans, 2 per cent Irish, 0.4 per cent Arab and 0.2 per cent black Caribbean. The largest ethnic group is white British at 39.8 per cent.
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By the Victorian era, Indian doctors were already practising in Britain — the first woman qualified in 1894 and the first surgeon qualified in 1898.