Dr Jose Chacko Periappuram
Padma Shri, 2011 · Padma Bhushan, 2025 — Cardiothoracic Surgery
The man who gave Kerala its first transplanted heart — and India its first second chance.

South Paravur, Ernakulam. A botanist’s son who took first rank in BSc Botany at St Thomas College, Pala, then walked into Government Medical College, Kottayam, and decided the heart was a more urgent plant than any his father had named. In 1986, before leaving for Ireland and the Royal Colleges, he told a teacher he wanted to do India’s first heart transplant. By the time he returned, AIIMS had already done it. He stayed in Kerala anyway. “I could have gone anywhere,” he said after the Padma Bhushan. “I decided to remain and offer my expertise to the people here.”

In the mid-1990s there was almost no open-heart surgery in the state. Patients flew to Chennai or Madras or further. Convincing a Malayali family that a chest could be opened in Kochi was itself a kind of operation.

Haripad, 2002. A medical camp. A 36-year-old named Abraham, told he had two or three months left. Periappuram spoke of transplant — still a rumour in Kerala.

Abraham did not flinch. “Doctor, you can do it. I’m willing.”

That sentence, the surgeon later said, became the cornerstone of the programme. The hospital agreed to bear the entire cost of the first case. On the night of 13 May 2003, in adjoining theatres at Medical Trust Hospital, Kochi, donor Sukumaran’s heart was lifted and sewn into Abraham. After one hour and forty-seven minutes it began to beat. Periappuram has written that his mind went still — not fear, not triumph, something quieter. A surgery he had never performed, the first in the state; if it failed, a career might have ended in that room. It did not.

Years later he stood in the Heart of Cape Town Museum, listening to the story of Christiaan Barnard. “He is a hero to me,” he said. “The first slide in every lecture we give on donation is his photograph.” He never met Barnard. He still keeps the slide.

March 2014. A patient whose first transplanted heart had been destroyed by infection. No one in India had given a second heart after a first had failed. Girish of Palakkad looked at him and laughed. “Doctor, I knew that too.” The re-transplant worked. India had its first heart retransplant. Kerala later received its first heart–lung transplant from the same hands. More than 20,000 open-heart operations. Beating-heart bypass. Awake bypass. Total arterial revascularisation — firsts for the state, one after another.

2015. Mathew Achadan, autorickshaw driver from Pariyaram, Thrissur, dilated cardiomyopathy, two children, a village that collected money in a church-festival meeting. A heart became available in Thiruvananthapuram. Road would take too long. Periappuram’s instinct: fly it. A Dornier. Thirty-five minutes. The first heart in Kerala to arrive by air. By midnight a new heart beat in Achadan’s chest.

When the Padma Bhushan was announced, Achadan said, “He is someone who goes to great lengths for his patients. He sacrifices sleep and time.”

In 2006 he founded the Heart Care Foundation. Its quiet arithmetic: “1,000 hearts, 1,000 lives, 1,000 families.” Hundreds of poor patients operated in government medical colleges, nearly two crore rupees of surgery paid for over years. Another programme teaches CPR in schools and streets. “If effective CPR is given at the right time,” he says, “at least thirty per cent of those who would have died of cardiac arrest could be saved.”

He is a medical writer as well as a cutter of chests. He still heads cardiac surgery at Lisie Heart Institute, Kochi. When the third-highest civilian honour came, he dedicated it not to himself but to Kerala’s healthcare system and to the nurses, drivers, donors’ families, and village committees who made the impossible ordinary.

A young doctor once asked him what he feels when a donated heart starts in a stranger’s body.

“That it is not a stranger’s,” he said. “For one hour and forty-seven minutes it is only a heart. Then it becomes someone’s father, someone’s driver, someone’s second life. That is the moment I wait for.”