Book Review | Of X-rays, CT & Tragedy at AIIMS
You would not get a better account of the hours that Indira Gandhi’s body remained at AIIMS before it was shifted to Teen Murti Bhavan
The title of the book is attention-grabbing and the first few pages about the day she took over as director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi when a bullet-ridden Indira Gandhi’s body was wheeled into the Emergency. She narrates the grim day without an iota of excitement and accurately. Her reaction of cordoning off the hospital premises showed an extraordinary presence of mind as she anticipates commotion outside. You would not get a better account of the hours that Indira Gandhi’s body remained at AIIMS before it was shifted to Teen Murti Bhavan.
Sneh Bhargava’s life story holds the reader’s attention throughout as she takes a clinical round of how she moved from Lady Hardinge College in the Delhi 0f 1950s after getting her medical degree to choose radiology as her specialisation. She chose radiology, then in its nascent stages in Delhi and in India, after ruling herself out from surgery, from gynaecology, from eye specialist or an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist. As a doctor her desire was to deal with the whole human body and not any specific part of it. Radiology offered the scope to examine the whole of the body. And she forcefully makes the case for the importance of radiology, and how it moves from the early stage of X-rays to that of scanners and to ultrasound. These are indeed diagnostic aids and technologies for determining the disease or ailment, but they play a key role in deciding the path of treatment. And she is optimistic about the use of AI in diagnostics.
It is in her bid to push for radiology that she shows the excitement of a scientist and her passion for promoting the new medical technologies to help in treating the suffering people. She writes: “I loved the X-ray. I was endlessly fascinated by the milky white and luminous images of the body against the inky black but strangely translucent background. To be able to see through the human body without cutting into it was a milestone in the history of medicine.” This was in the early 1960s when she had joined the AIIMS in 1961. She was 31. And in 1973, when she was 42, and travelling to Scandinavia, England and the USA, she writes about her encounter with the computer axial tomography (CT) scanner and ultrasound for the first time. About the CT scanner she writes: “The CT scanner was a miracle. It allowed us to see the soft tissue and bones separately, as though the body was being sliced like a loaf of bread — you could see ach part.” At a neuroradiology workshop in New York, she saw the CT scan of the head. She writes: “I looked in awe at the intracranial soft tissues and ventricles in the brain, seen as separate structures.” Her excitement at new turns in medicine is palpable. And she writes about it almost in poetic rhapsody.
The Woman Who Ran AIIMS: The Memoirs of a Medical Pioneer
By Sneh Bhargava
Juggernaut
pp. 245; Rs 699