Dr. Sivaramakrishna Iyer Padmavati
India’s first woman cardiologist and the “Godmother of Cardiology”

Sivaramakrishna Iyer Padmavati was born on 20 June 1917 in Rangoon (now Yangon), Burma, into a Tamil family; her father was a barrister. She became the first woman to graduate MBBS from Rangoon Medical College. When Japan invaded Burma in 1942 she fled with her mother and sisters on one of the last flights to India.

After the war she trained extensively abroad: she earned Fellowships of the Royal College of Physicians of London and of Edinburgh, spent time in Sweden, studied under Helen Taussig at Johns Hopkins University, and worked with Paul Dudley White, the father of modern cardiology, at Harvard Medical School. She returned to India in 1953 and joined Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi as a lecturer.

There, against the scepticism of some senior colleagues who regarded cardiology as a male preserve, she established North India’s first cardiac clinic and the region’s first cardiac catheterisation laboratory in 1954. In 1962 she founded the All India Heart Foundation. In 1967 she became Director-Principal of Maulana Azad Medical College and developed the cardiology department at the associated G.B. Pant Hospital. She introduced India’s first DM course in Cardiology, the first coronary-care unit and the first coronary-care van in the country.

After formal retirement she founded the National Heart Institute in Delhi in 1981 under the All India Heart Foundation and directed it for decades, turning it into a centre for tertiary care, research and preventive cardiology that collaborated with the World Health Organization. She remained clinically active well into her nineties, seeing patients and advising younger doctors.

Colleagues and students remembered a physician of quiet authority and unwavering discipline. One junior doctor, watching her examine a patient with meticulous care late in the evening, later recalled her saying:

“The heart does not recognise age or gender. It only asks that we listen carefully and act with honesty.”

The Government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan in 1967 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1992. She died on 29 August 2020 at the age of 103 from complications of COVID-19 at the National Heart Institute she had founded.

In the story of Indian doctors, Sivaramakrishna Iyer Padmavati stands as a trailblazer who opened the doors of cardiology to women, built institutions that still serve the nation, and proved that scientific excellence and compassionate care can reshape an entire specialty.