Dr. Lala Suraj Nandan Prasad
(Padma Shri, 1974 – Medicine)

On New Year’s Day 1914, in the town of Bihar Sharif, a boy was born who would one day give organised paediatric care to the children of Bihar. Lala Suraj Nandan Prasad, son of the lawyer Babu Ram Prasad Lalwas, showed early academic brilliance. He topped the Bhagalpur district in his matriculation examination from Dumka Zilla School in 1933, winning the McPherson Gold Medal. He went on to graduate in medicine from the Prince of Wales Medical College (later Patna Medical College) in 1939.

After further training in the United Kingdom he returned to India in 1947 and joined Patna Medical College as a lecturer in 1948. At a time when specialised care for children barely existed in the region, he set about creating a dedicated department of paediatrics. Through steady effort he expanded the children’s ward into a full 250-bed Children’s Hospital—the foundation of modern paediatric services in Bihar. He became Professor of Paediatrics in 1962 and later Professor Emeritus.

His vision extended beyond one institution. In 1964, when the Indian Pediatric Society and the Association of Pediatricians of India merged to form the Indian Academy of Pediatrics, he was chosen as its founder President. He also served as Vice-President of the National Academy of Medical Sciences. Generations of doctors trained under him learned that treating a child meant treating a whole family and a whole future.

One young resident, after a long night in the children’s ward, once asked him why he still examined every child so carefully even when exhausted.
Prasad replied with quiet firmness, “A child cannot always tell you where it hurts. You must listen with your eyes, your hands and your heart. That is the first lesson of paediatrics.”

In 1974 the Government of India recognised his pioneering work with the Padma Shri. Married to Shakuntala Devi and father of eight children, he continued to guide and inspire until his death in Patna on 22 April 2009 at the age of ninety-five.

Dr. Lala Suraj Nandan Prasad is remembered as the architect of paediatrics in Bihar—a physician who turned scattered concern for children’s health into an organised specialty and left behind hospitals, an academy and a tradition of compassionate care that still serves the youngest patients of the state.