Dr. Jacob Chandy
The father of modern neurosurgery in India

Jacob Chandy was born on 23 January 1910 in Kottayam, Kerala, into a devout Anglican Syrian Christian family. After graduating in medicine from Madras Medical College in 1936, he worked for a time in Bahrain with the American medical missionary Paul Harrison. It was Harrison who urged the young surgeon to pursue the still-young specialty of neurosurgery in North America.

Chandy trained at the Montreal Neurological Institute under the legendary Wilder Penfield and later worked with Theodore Rasmussen in Chicago. He returned to India in 1949 carrying not only surgical skill but a clear conviction: neurosurgery belonged in his own country.

At the Christian Medical College in Vellore he founded the first Department of Neurological Sciences in India — and, indeed, in South Asia. The obstacles were many. Senior colleagues in other specialties often regarded neurosurgery as impractical or unnecessary under Indian conditions. Beds had to be borrowed. Equipment was scarce. Yet Chandy persisted.

On 25 August 1952 he performed India’s first epilepsy surgery, operating on a young man with infantile hemiplegia and intractable seizures while the visiting Penfield looked on. In 1957–58 he established the country’s first formal training programme in neurosurgery, modelled on the North American system he had absorbed in Montreal and Chicago. Over the years he trained nearly twenty neurosurgeons, many of whom went on to found departments in their own states.

In 1951, together with B. Ramamurthi, Baldev Singh and S. T. Narasimhan, he helped create the Neurological Society of India and became its first president. He later served as Principal of CMC Vellore, using the position to strengthen specialty training across disciplines.

One of his early trainees later recalled a difficult case in the operating theatre:

“Sir, the anatomy is distorted. Should we stop?”

Chandy’s reply was characteristically calm. “The brain does not forgive hesitation, but it also does not forgive recklessness. Look again. Plan again. Then proceed with care.”

In 1964 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan for his contributions to neurosurgery and medical education. International bodies, including the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, later honoured him as well.

Jacob Chandy died on 23 June 2007 at the age of ninety-seven. By then the department he had started in a borrowed corner of CMC had become one of the most respected centres of neurological sciences in Asia, and the specialty he introduced to India had taken root across the country.

In the story of Indian doctors he occupies a unique place: the pioneer who returned from the great centres of the West not to remain abroad, but to plant neurosurgery in Indian soil, train a generation, and prove that the most delicate of surgeries could be performed with excellence in the hospitals of his own land.