Dr. Santosh Kumar Sen (1910–1979)
The pioneering surgeon who opened Indian chests to the future

In the old city of Delhi, on 21 October 1910, a boy named Santosh Kumar Sen was born into a time when modern surgery in India was still finding its feet. He studied first in Delhi, then graduated in medicine from Lahore. Ambition and curiosity soon carried him farther—to Vienna, where he stood at the operating tables of masters like Lorenz Böhler, Lichtenburg and Kunz, and later to Berlin under the legendary Sauerbruch. He returned with an MD from Vienna and the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (1937), ready to reshape the craft in his own country.

In 1938 he joined Irwin Hospital (today’s Lok Nayak Hospital) in New Delhi as its first honorary consultant surgeon. The wards were crowded, the equipment limited, and tuberculosis still claimed far too many lives. Sen specialised in thoracic work. He refined the surgical treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis, developed a modified thoracoplasty that earned him the Fellowship of the American Trudeau Society, and in 1948 performed some of the earliest cardiac operations in India. Colleagues watched a man who moved with quiet confidence, speaking little in the theatre yet teaching constantly by example.

“Surgery is not only the knife,” he would tell young doctors. “It is judgment, patience, and the courage to try what has not yet been done here.”

He helped turn Irwin Hospital into a true teaching institution. When Maulana Azad Medical College was established, Sen became its first honorary faculty surgeon and head of postgraduate studies. He founded the Delhi Surgical Society, served as President of the Delhi Medical Association (1952), of the Thoracic Surgeons Association for three consecutive years, and of the Association of Surgeons of India in 1959. He sat on the court of the University of Delhi and edited the Surgical Journal of Delhi. Recognition followed: Padma Bhushan in 1962, election as the first Indian surgeon to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1964, membership of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, and fellowship of the Surgeons’ Association of the German Democratic Republic.

At home he was husband to Dr Sita Sen, a gynaecologist, and father to a son and two daughters. Friends remembered a surgeon of abiding affection for his fellow men—demanding in the operating room, generous outside it. When he died in 1979, Indian surgery had already begun to stand taller because of the foundations he laid.

In a book about Indian doctors, Santosh Kumar Sen belongs among the quiet pioneers who brought the scalpel into the modern age on Indian soil. He treated the lungs that tuberculosis had ravaged and the hearts that had never before been opened under an Indian surgeon’s hand. He trained the next generation, built institutions, and proved that excellence needed no passport. The first Indian elected FRCS England, the man who helped give Delhi its surgical voice—his legacy still beats in every thoracic and cardiac theatre that followed.