The Eye Doctor of Madurai

The old man with the twisted fingers picked up the surgical instruments.

His hands looked as if they could barely hold a pen. Rheumatoid arthritis had bent his fingers out of shape many years before. Yet under the microscope, those hands moved steadily, and in a few minutes a patient who had been blind with cataract was ready to see again.

Over his working life, Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy is believed to have performed around a hundred thousand eye operations. But his greatest work began when he was fifty-eight, the age at which he was made to retire.

A village boy

He was born in 1918 in a farming village in southern Tamil Nadu. There was no school in the village to begin with, and he wrote his first letters in the sand. He later walked a long way each day to reach school.

He studied chemistry in Madurai and then medicine in Madras. He had seen women in his own family die in childbirth, and he wanted to become a doctor who looked after mothers. After qualifying, he joined the army medical corps.

Then, around the age of thirty, his body turned against him. He developed severe rheumatoid arthritis. For about a year he could hardly get out of bed. His joints swelled, and his fingers were left permanently bent. The army discharged him.

Learning again

When he could stand again, he went back to study. He chose ophthalmology, the care of the eyes. It is delicate work, done with the hands, and he had to learn ways of holding the instruments that his stiff fingers could manage. He practised until his operations were as good as anyone's.

He rose to lead the eye department at the government medical college in Madurai. Everywhere he looked he saw people who were blind for no good reason. Millions of Indians had lost their sight to cataract, a clouding of the lens of the eye that a short operation can cure. They were blind simply because they could not reach a surgeon, or could not pay.

He began to take his team out to the villages, holding eye camps in schools and temples, examining hundreds of people at a time and bringing those who needed surgery back to the hospital.

Eleven beds

In 1976 he reached the government's age of retirement. He was fifty-eight. Most people would have rested. He started a hospital.

With his family's help, he opened the Aravind Eye Hospital in a house in Madurai, with eleven beds. He named it after the philosopher Sri Aurobindo, whose ideas inspired him. Several of the beds were set aside for patients who could not pay anything at all. His sister, Dr G. Natchiar, and her husband, Dr P. Namperumalsamy, both eye doctors, joined him, and later more of the family followed.

The idea was simple. Patients who could afford it would pay. Their fees would cover the cost of treating those who could not. Everyone would get the same care from the same doctors.

To make that work, the hospital had to be very efficient. Dr V, as everyone called him, was fascinated by the way McDonald's restaurants served the same meal quickly and reliably all over the world. He wondered why eye care could not be organised just as carefully. At Aravind, nurses and assistants were trained to do the preparation and checks, so that each surgeon could spend time on what only a surgeon could do. Two operating tables stood side by side, so a surgeon could finish one patient and turn straight to the next.

Sight for millions

The hospital grew and grew. New Aravind hospitals opened in other cities of Tamil Nadu and beyond. Most patients still paid little or nothing, yet the hospitals paid their own way.

In 1992 Aravind set up Aurolab, to make the artificial lenses used in cataract surgery. Imported lenses were far too costly for poor patients. Aurolab made them at a small fraction of the price, and its lenses are now used in many countries.

Doctors and hospital managers came from around the world to study Aravind. Today the Aravind hospitals examine and treat millions of patients every year.

The light in the eyes

Dr Venkataswamy never married. He lived simply and kept working into his eighties, rising early and visiting the wards. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1973. He died in Madurai in July 2006.

He had once hoped to care for mothers and babies. Instead, his twisted hands helped to bring light back to the eyes of millions of strangers, most of whom he never met.

Want to read more?

Infinite Vision, by Pavithra K. Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy, tells the story of Dr V and Aravind in rich detail. The Aravind Eye Care System's website has its history and current work.