Brig. Santosh Kumar Mazumdar
The father of nuclear medicine in India

Santosh Kumar Mazumdar was born on 1 September 1920 in Dinajpur, North Bengal (now in Bangladesh). His father, Dr. S. N. Mazumdar, was one of the founder members of the Patna Medical Association. Young Santosh first earned a first-class B.Sc. (Honours) in Physics from Patna University in 1939. Only then, fulfilling his father’s wish, did he turn to medicine. He graduated MBBS from the same university in 1945, standing first in every year of the course, and was commissioned into the Army Medical Corps on 18 August that year.

In 1954 he went to the United Kingdom on study leave. There he trained in the emerging field then called radiation medicine and obtained the MRCP (Edinburgh) in 1955. When he returned to India in 1956 he was almost certainly the first medically qualified specialist in the country in what would later be known as nuclear medicine. Posted to the Defence Science Laboratory in Delhi, he established its Radiation Cell and began exploring the biomedical uses of radioisotopes.

In 1959, at Safdarjung Hospital, he treated ten patients with hyperthyroidism using radioactive iodine-131 — the first such therapeutic use in India. He was convinced that nuclear techniques could greatly strengthen both diagnosis and treatment. With the support of Defence Minister V. K. Krishna Menon and others, he helped create the Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Allied Sciences (INMAS) under the Defence Research and Development Organisation in 1961. He became Director of INMAS in October 1966 and remained in the post until his retirement on 29 August 1977.

Because no formal postgraduate training existed in the specialty, he instituted a one-year Diploma in Radiation Medicine (DRM) in collaboration with the University of Delhi. He also served as President of the Society of Nuclear Medicine of India for two consecutive terms.

Colleagues remembered a physician who never lost sight of the human being behind the isotope scan. One young doctor, watching him explain a thyroid treatment to an anxious patient, later recalled Mazumdar saying quietly:

“The atom is powerful, but the patient is more important. We use the one only to serve the other.”

In 1964 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri for his pioneering work. He died on 6 August 1984.

Today INMAS stands as a major centre for nuclear medicine and thyroid care, and the specialty he introduced has grown across the country. In the story of Indian doctors, Brig. Santosh Kumar Mazumdar occupies a unique place: the army physician who brought the power of the atom into the service of healing and laid the foundations of an entire new branch of medicine in independent India.