Dr. Naresh Trehan (born 12 August 1946) is one of India’s most celebrated cardiovascular and cardiothoracic surgeons. He is the Chairman and Managing Director of Medanta – The Medicity in Gurugram and has performed more than 48,000 successful open-heart surgeries. The Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1991 and the Padma Bhushan in 2001.

Born into a medical family — his father an ENT specialist and his mother a gynaecologist — Trehan spent his early years in what is now Pakistan before the family moved to Delhi after Partition. He studied at Modern School and later joined King George’s Medical College in Lucknow, graduating with an MBBS in 1968. Those years in Lucknow, he often says, taught him the ground realities of Indian life.

In 1969 he left for the United States, training first at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and later at New York University Medical Center under the renowned surgeon Dr. Frank Spencer. He became board-certified in both surgery and cardiothoracic surgery and built a successful practice in New York, known for taking on high-risk cases that others turned down. Being ambidextrous, he worked with remarkable speed, reducing the time patients spent under anaesthesia.

Yet the pull of home remained strong. “India needs this level of cardiac care,” he told colleagues in the mid-1980s. “If I stay here, I can operate on a few hundred more patients. If I go back, I can change the system.”

In 1988 he returned and co-founded the Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre in Delhi, which quickly became one of Asia’s leading cardiac centres. For two decades he served as its executive director and chief cardiovascular surgeon. In 2009 he founded Medanta – The Medicity, a large multi-specialty hospital in Gurugram that integrates advanced technology with patient-centred care. He has been personal surgeon to the President of India since 1991.

Beyond surgery, Trehan has championed minimally invasive and robotic techniques, trained generations of cardiac surgeons, and authored hundreds of scientific papers. His awards include the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award, the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award, and recognition as one of the “Seven Legends” in heart surgery by an international congress.

Even after five decades in the operating theatre, his philosophy remains simple. “A successful operation is not the end,” he once remarked to a young resident. “The real success is when the patient walks out and starts living fully again.”

Dr. Naresh Trehan continues to lead Medanta and remains one of the defining figures in Indian cardiac surgery, remembered both for the thousands of lives he has saved and for the institutions he has built.