Dr Noshir Antia brought his healing touch to social ills too

Today, when medicine has virtually become an ally of commerce, Dr Noshir H Antia’s autobiography, A Life Of Change, holds special relevance. “Five-star hospitals, with their marble facades and array of sophisticated equipments provide the ‘latest’ and the most expensive service. It has increased costs astronomically but with hardly any increase in efficiency and effectiveness. At the same time, basic and appropriate surgery is out of the reach of 90 per cent of our population,” asserts the doctor who started his surgical career in India in 1955, in what was then a small hospital in Pune, the Jehangir Nursing Home.

The only surgical service in this hospital was provided once a fortnight by Dr RN Cooper. Dr Antia was appointed as the latter’s house surgeon. Despite his seniority, (the Cooper Hospital in Mumbai was, in later years, named after this brilliant doctor) Dr Cooper did not hesitate to learn from Dr Antia the skills he had acquired during his nine year stint in England. “In the spartan conditions that prevailed in post-war England I had learnt that there was a lot that could be achieved under very difficult conditions,” recounts Dr Antia. “India was more ‘need-based’ as a society and so presented an opportunity to do good work in less than ideal conditions.”

Jehangir Nursing Home honed his skills further along these lines. “It was here that I learnt to see patients as human beings with social, emotional, economic and other problems,” writes the doctor.

When a patient could not keep an appointment, post-operation, because he had to walk twelve miles from his village to the hospital, Dr Antia realised that treating patients did not entail mere medical knowledge. Subsequently, his travels, both in India and abroad, convinced him that it was as important to eliminate poverty and malnutrition as it was to dispense medical care in villages, using locally-trained community members.

Antia first used this two-pronged approach to healing in Mandwa, a village across the Bombay harbour. Minimally-educated village women were trained in basic, preventive health care and taught to prescribe simple, oral medicines. The Mandwa project grew into the Foundation For Research Into Community Health; this in turn provided the blueprint for the path-breaking 1981 public health report, Health for All: An Alternative Strategy, which was used to formulate India’s Health Policy in 1983. While working on this report Antia met one of its guiding lights, JP Naik, who left a lasting impression on him. Naik spelt out the factors that determine the health of people: education, gender equality, nutrition and, ultimately, the political system that decides the type as well as the delivery of health services.

Not surprisingly, Naik’s prescription for education and health gathered dust, while those of the World Bank were eagerly adopted. But Naik did not despair. On his deathbed, with a blink of his eye he wished Antia ‘good luck’.

“Now, 25 years after it was formulated, the main findings of the report have been incorporated in the National Health Policy of 2000,” writes Antia. “It is obvious now that the method of grass-roots health care enunciated in the report… is appropriate for the rich, the middle class and the poor.”

Antia’s story is of a man who persistently swam against the tide. As one of the pioneering plastic surgeons of India, (the first in the state-run JJ Hospital), he insisted on treating the deformities of cured leprosy patients along with others in the plastic surgery ward, antagonising, in the process, many an orthodox mind in his fraternity. Then, seeing how even cured leprosy patients were forced to beg on the streets made the iconoclastic doctor realise that rehabilitation of patients was as important as the correction of deformities.

So, taking advantage of the PL-480 funds from the US, Antia
introduced physical and occupational therapy for leprosy and burns-affected patients. One cured leprosy patient, Suresh Kamat, in fact, became his in-house artist and photographer. Kamat’s resultant knowledge of surgical operations became so profound that Antia’s trainees often invited him to be present at operations.

Though Antia acquired invaluable knowledge from his stints in western countries, he believed that, devoid of social values, science and technology merely pander to human greed. “In health and medicine, it is time to integrate our age-old culture of health practices with the most relevant aspects of Western science to ensure the greater good of all; and not turn health into a commodity that only a few can purchase,” believed the nationally and internationally feted doctor.

Dr Antia’s autobiography, put together by senior journalist, Sherna Gandhy, is an inspirational read not just for those from the field of medicine, but all those who want to change life around them for the better.