The Hindu Business Line : Winning hearts, all the way

Eminent cardio thoracic surgeon Dr Solomon Victor, who passed away in Chennai last Friday from a massive cardiac arrest, leaves behind him a unique legacy. The museum with the hearts of creatures ranging from the earthworm to the whale, is but one. "I've decided to donate this to the Veterinary College for the benefit of veterinary students," says his wife, Dr Suniti Solomon, former Professor of Microbiology at the Madras Medical College and Director of the YRG Care in Chennai. Similarly she will donate to the MMC Pathology department another treasure trove left behind by her husband, who apart from being a brilliant and humane cardiac surgeon, was also a man of varied interests.

A couple of days before his death he had asked his friend, professional photographer V. Karthik, to do a photo series on the lotus in Sriperumbudur.

Dr V. Sadasivam, the doyen of heart surgery in Tamil Nadu, had sent Dr Victor, considered his "blue-eyed boy", to Dr Denton Cooley at Texas Heart Institute for training. On his return he did the first open heart surgery in Chennai at the General Hospital.

Every associate/friend of Dr Victor that you talk to recalls how hard he tried to never send away a poor patient without treatment. "At the GH, we have seen him give money from his pocket to patients to buy medicines," recalled Dr Paul Ponraj, cardiac surgeon at the Vijaya Heart Foundation. "He hated the practice of kickbacks for lab referrals," recalls Suniti. "I remember years ago he had fired a lab for sending him Rs 10 as commission! He made them trace the patient and return the money to him."

These days, of course, the amount would be at least a couple of thousand rupees for referring a patient for a CT scan!

"When we got the Cath lab, somebody suggested this would be a money-spinning machine, but he couldn't spin money out of anything. That is why the Heart Institute that he started in 1987 had to be closed down. He got the lab because when he referred his patients to other centres, they had to pay much more," she adds.

In the early stages of his career the young Dr Victor picked up awards and medals effortlessly. But the Hunterian medal must have been special to him; it brought him to the notice of Suniti, who at first refused to even contribute the Rs 10 being collected to buy him a pen as a gift. At the MMC, where both worked, he was commonly referred to as `swamiar' by the female students, as he had no time for women.

Once, in the ward Suniti received a firing from him for no fault of hers. Later, on discovering this, he offered to buy her coffee to make up. But the young woman deferred the coffee session to the next morning, wanting her friends to witness how she had broken the "swamiar's resolve." In the bargain she also won a dozen ice-creams from her friends.

Anyway, they were married in 1967, and their son, now Dr Sunil, an MD in Public Health (done "at my father's urging, as he believed that preventing a disease is much more important than treating it.") was born after 13 years.

Interestingly, Dr Victor's memorial service will be held on July 30 not in a church but at the Food Village on the East Coast Road... amidst nature and the waters of the sea... that he loved. Suniti recalls how after Sunil's birth, respecting the vow taken by a colleague, they went to Tirupati for the 13-month-old child's mundan. "The moment he saw the huge blade held by the barber, he screamed: `You are going to kill my child, I'm not going to allow you to touch him before you boil that blade and sterilise it properly.'"

This was done and when the group approached Lord Venkateshwara for blessings, "we were surprised to see the priest call out to him and take us right inside the sanctum sanctorum. Later he revealed the cut down his chest and said: "Ayya, you operated on me free of cost and saved my life."

Miraculously a similar incident occurred at Guruvayur, where the child was taken to fulfil another vow made by another relative. "Both he and Sunil were not allowed inside as they were non-Hindus. But again the priest turned out to be his patient, and he brought out the weighing scales to the courtyard to perform the ceremony where the child had to be weighed against sugar," she recalls.

The proud son recalls the day his father delivered the Hunterian lecture on the Inferior Vena Cavae at a meeting of the Royal College of Surgeons with Bach music in the background... "There was pin-drop silence in the hall and the president of the Royal College said that was the best lecture he had ever heard."

But finally the heart of the man, who was trained by Dr Cooley and Dr Donald Ross and who had conducted 20,000 open-heart procedures, many of them on the poorest of poor patients, gave way. And not the least of the reasons for this was his eating habits. Both Suniti and Sunil recall with a smile his love for eggs, butter and condensed milk. "Now that is certainly not the best of diets that any cardiac surgeon would recommend for anybody," says Sunil. But he also knows his father lived an amazingly interesting life... fascinated by the joys of nature... the blooming of a flower, the evolution and flight of a butterfly, the heart of a whale, the migratory habits of birds and fish, the magic world of numerology and the mysterious world of astrology.

To this correspondent he had introduced Narayanan, the numerologist and Munneswara Rao, the astrologer. In fact, when he got a very complicated case of a little boy at the GH and everybody said he would not survive the surgery, he consulted Rao, who told him: `Even if you cut up this child into pieces, he will survive'. So he went ahead with the surgery, and later told me that three or four times he was almost gone on the table, but ultimately the operation was successful, and the child lived.

Not many people knew that behind the serious surgeon and the dreamer lay a prankster. Says Sunil, "Once my uncle said he would bake a cake at home and wanted eight eggs kept for the purpose. My father made a tiny hole in each of them, put in a syringe and emptied them... into his stomach, and refilled them with green, pink and yellow liquid. As the cake-making progressed and my uncle grandly said: `Now you have to slowly mix in the eggs', you can imagine his horror when he found each egg filled with a coloured liquid."

Soli's sense of humour did not desert him till the end. In May 2006, he got a severe heart attack and collapsed just outside the ICU of the hospital where he operated. With the best care on call, he survived, to tell the cardiac surgeon, "Why did you stop my celestial journey?"

Adds Suniti, "Next day when a friend, an immigration officer, visited him in hospital, he said, "You didn't give me proper visa, so St Peter sent me back." At home he talked about his "second innings", and told Sunil: "St Peter sent me back to get you married."

But the man who had led such an amazingly interesting life could barely keep the promise made to his family, to take total rest. "A few days before his death he had a long chat with his son and told him that this is not the kind of life he wishes to lead," says Suniiti. He promised them he would not operate and would occasionally see patients at his clinic. But four days before he died, when a poor patient from Dharmapuri came knocking at his door with a valve problem, he broke his promise and performed the surgery for no fee, telling his family about it only later.

When death finally came, it caught him doing what he loved to do... writing down notes on the evolution of a certain kind of fish.

Says Father P.P. George, a close friend and former principal of Sacred Hearts College, Tirupattur, "I know that of every three surgeries he did, at least one was free for a poor patient." A tough taskmaster, many juniors found it difficult to work with him. Says Dr Ponraj, "Many of us could not work with him because he was such a perfectionist and had so much passion for his work. He would say surgery cannot be taught, it has to be learnt by observation and hard work. He would frown at his students taking study leave, and say, "True learning is not from books but at the bedside of the patient. Remain in the hospital by the patient and you will learn the best lessons."

Right till the end, Dr Victor was busy organising health care programmes in village schools; such children will miss his caring presence.

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