The Hindu Business Line : A dreamer and a surgeon with a heart of gold

Solomon Victor, the eminent cardiac surgeon, who passed away in his house in Chennai on Friday, was much more than a brilliant heart surgeon. Of course to him goes the credit of doing the first open heart operation in Chennai at the Government General Hospital, but to Soli, as he was known to his friends, the heart was much more than an organ with a pump, valves and blood vessels. At least his heart was much more than that.

On numerous occasions this correspondent had chatted with him for long hours on the high cost of heart surgery and how it was beyond the reach of thousands of Indians.

"That is why we should concentrate on preventing heart disease", he would say and in collaboration with the Rotary Club of Madras East and the Chennai Corporation he had worked tirelessly in the `90s to get lakhs of school children screened for prevention of rheumatic heart disease (RHD).

This, he would say, could be done by inexpensive pills given in time for throat infection and other simple ailments that were precursors to RHD if left untreated.

Over the years, one had watched him with admiration empathising with his patients, waiving his surgical fee at the drop of a hat and even advising relatives of patients with complicated heart disease not to go in for surgery.

He would tell me: "I know this is bad for my business, but some of these patients come from agricultural families from the villages. I can waive my fee but to pay for the hospitalisation and other charges, they often sell all their belongings - including land - to raise the Rs 1 lakh or so required. If the disease is complex, surgery and medication can help only to a certain extent, and if the man dies after a couple of years, what will happen to his wife and children?"

These are not the kind of words that you hear from too many doctors today. He was also one of those rare doctors who would donate his own blood, while he was the cardiac surgery chief at the GH, to the odd patient who could not afford to buy blood.

Even on Monday, just four days before his death, he had performed a closed mitral valvotomy (a procedure on the mitral valve in the heart) on a poor patient from Dharmapuri, at the Harvey Heart Hospital. And this, says his son Dr. Sunil Solomon, after he had been advised complete rest by his doctors.

In May, Dr Victor had suffered a heart attack and was hospitalised for four weeks. "He hated it, and every time I visited him in the ICU, he would write on a piece of paper: `Get these tubes out of me'.

After being discharged he took rest for some time, and then revolted, saying: `What kind of life is this,' and went back to his research and writing... his latest project being on the evolution of a certain kind of fish."

Apparently, the Dharmapuri patient had gone to a couple of hospitals where he couldn't afford the fee and was directed to Dr Victor by somebody.

"He informed us he had done the operation only after it was over; he had promised us that he would take it easy and not do surgery any more," said Dr Sunil.

A fascinating human being, after quickly putting behind him the interview for which one regularly met him in the `90s - be it on RHD, the devising of the perfect Indian valve or ethics in medical practice - he would switch to talk on the intriguing migratory habits of the salmon, fishing out books on the topic; or the blooming of a flower, the various stages of which he had photographed with phenomenal patience; the sheer beauty of the cacti; or the enchanting world of the butterfly.

Frontline magazine had carried many of Dr Victor's pictures on butterflies, cacti and flowers. The terrace garden in his house was ready and in full bloom, growing even groundnuts, before its doors and windows could be fixed!

Dr Victor doesn't leave behind any grand institution - the Heart Institute he had started in Vijaya Health Centre in 1987 had to be closed as he was not a scalpel-happy surgeon, and it was not financially viable. But one hopes that the butterfly park that he set up in Don Bosco school would survive.

And surely, his memory will live on in the hearts he had mended, particularly of those poor patients to whom he had virtually given the gift of life... without a fee.

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in