This paper highlights the importance of the influence of UK medical training and the continuing aura of British medical qualifications in the Indian subcontinent to the staffing of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in the first thirty-five years of its existence. Its conclusions are based on thirty-seven interviews with South-Asian trained doctors who worked as GPs in the NHS and on archival research. If British rule in the Indian subcontinent came to an end in the 1940s, the pattern of ‘medical dependency’ (Jeffery, 1979) defined under the British Empire persisted post-independence. The education that South Asian doctors received was modeled on the curricula of UK medical schools. Lessons and manuals were in English, teaching was frequently delivered by doctors who had themselves trained in the UK. Gaining a postgraduate qualification in the former metropole continued to be perceived as the ultimate accolade for young graduates aspiring to a successful medical career. Rather than seeing the migration of South Asian doctors to the UK exclusively as a response to staff shortages in an expanding NHS, it is helpful to place this movement in the context of the longer history of the movement of doctors within the British Empire. Recognising that there is a common ‘socio-cognitive community’ which links medicine in the Indian subcontinent and in the UK (Raghuram et al. 2011) serves to bring to the fore some of the historical factors which led to South Asian doctors being employed in the NHS. This, in turn, helps to explain how the NHS was able to meet its staffing requirements in the first thirty-five years of its existence. The overlap between medical training and the filling of junior hospital posts supported the emergence of an official UK discourse according to which doctors were in the country on a temporary basis to train, rather than to offer a permanent solution to staff shortages. Doctors themselves talk of coming to the UK to gain qualifications, rather than of planning to migrate permanently. The National Health Service in the first three and a half decades of its existence can thus be seen as a post-imperial institution, supported in its development and shaped in its nature by the persistence of patterns of thinking and teaching in South Asian medical schools and of movement of South Asian medical graduates which were defined at the time of the British Empire.