deemag and chest clinic

Dr. Prem Chandra Dhanda (1911–2013)
The cardiologist who built institutions and listened to the nation’s heartbeat

In the cantonment town of Ambala, where the air still carried the dust of martial-law years and the echoes of Jallianwala Bagh, a boy named Prem Chandra Dhanda was born on 28 May 1911. His father, Dunichand Ambalvi, was a lawyer and Congress leader who spent stretches in British jails; his mother, Bhagdevi, walked the same path of quiet defiance. While his parents faced the lathi and the lock-up, young Prem topped the Punjab matriculation examination, setting a new record. He carried that same quiet fire into Government College, Lahore, and then into King Edward Medical College, where he graduated in 1934 with gold medals in medicine and in gynaecology & obstetrics.

After a house job at Mayo Hospital he sailed for London, worked at Hammersmith Hospital, and passed the MRCP on his first attempt. In 1938 he joined the Indian Army Medical Corps. Posted to the Middle East and North Africa as a medical specialist, he rose to Lieutenant Colonel. War taught him the urgency of clear diagnosis under pressure; it also taught him the value of steady hands when everything else shook.

On 2 October 1939—Gandhi’s birthday—he married Dr Leila Dharmavir in a simple court ceremony. Her father had left a comfortable practice in England to join the freedom struggle; the young couple understood that medicine and nation-building were never entirely separate callings. They would raise two daughters in a home where stethoscopes and books shared the same shelves.

In 1945 Dhanda left the army and settled in Delhi. He opened a private practice that soon became known for its diagnostic precision in cardiology, and joined Irwin Hospital (later Lok Nayak Hospital) as an honorary physician. The consulting room saw a procession of history’s makers: Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Govind Ballabh Pant, Zakir Husain. One can almost hear the quiet conversations.

“Your pulse is steady, Bapu, but the blood pressure needs watching,” he might have said to Gandhi after a long fast.
“Doctor-sahib, the country is my patient now,” the Mahatma would reply with a tired smile.
With Nehru the talk turned to the future of medical education; with Sardar Patel it was brisk, practical, focused on the body’s limits and the nation’s needs.

Dhanda never sought the limelight. He simply placed his stethoscope where it was needed and spoke the truth as he heard it.

When the All India Institute of Medical Sciences was planned and then shifted away from Irwin Hospital, leaving the old institution without teaching status, Dhanda and a few senior colleagues refused to let it wither. He argued, persuaded, and finally convinced the Medical Council of India and the government that Delhi needed another medical college. Thus Maulana Azad Medical College was born, attached to Irwin. Later, when the post of Director-Principal fell vacant in 1965, the staff unanimously requested him. He accepted—but on his own terms: he would draw a token salary of one rupee a month and continue limited private practice after official hours, because honorary faculty received no pension. For two full years he worked eight-hour days for that single rupee, clearing administrative log-jams and, more importantly, creating specialist departments that did not yet exist in most of India: psychiatry, cardiology, cardiac surgery, gastroenterology, neurology, neurosurgery. Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital was set firmly on the path to becoming a superspecialty centre because one man refused to accept that “it cannot be done.”

In 1962 the nation recognised him with the Padma Bhushan. In 1967 he was elected FRCP (London) and became a Fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences. He returned to private practice, still teaching younger doctors by example, still listening carefully to every heartbeat that crossed his threshold. He reduced his clinical work only gradually and finally stopped seeing patients at the age of ninety-six.

Leila predeceased him in 1996 after a sudden heart attack. He lived on with undiminished intellect until 28 February 2013, reaching the age of 101, surrounded by daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In a book about Indian doctors, Prem Chandra Dhanda stands as the physician who treated the bodies of the freedom fighters and then built the institutions that would treat the bodies of the free. He never raised his voice, yet his work still echoes in the wards of Maulana Azad Medical College and G.B. Pant Hospital. A quiet giant, stethoscope in hand, one rupee a month, and a lifetime of listening.