In a small village in the Kangra hills of Himachal Pradesh, a boy named Jagdev Singh Guleria walked several kilometres each day to school, sometimes fording a river, with little more than determination and a growing curiosity about the human body. Born around 1927–28 in Manjara, he completed his MBBS in 1953 and MD in 1957 from Punjab University. In 1958 he made a decisive choice: he resigned from a secure government post to join the newly founded All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi. There he earned a DM in Cardiology in 1962 and stayed for the rest of his academic career.

At AIIMS he helped build the institution from its earliest days, admitting some of its first patients and rising to become Professor and later Dean of the Department of Medicine. Colleagues and students remembered him as a master of bedside clinical skill—an era before CT scans and MRIs—when a careful history and physical examination could reveal almost everything. “He could give a full diagnosis with half the symptoms,” they said. He treated the whole person, not just an organ, and taught generations of doctors that medicine begins with listening.

On the night of 31 October 1984 he was among the physicians who attended to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after she was brought to AIIMS. After retiring in 1987 he helped establish the Department of Medicine at the University College of Medical Sciences and continued seeing patients for more than three decades at the Sitaram Bhartia Institute. He remained a guiding presence on ethics committees and professional bodies.

The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri in 2003; AIIMS later gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. His sons, Randeep and Sandeep Guleria, both also Padma Shri awardees, carried forward the family’s medical tradition. On 22 January 2026, at the age of 98, Jagdev Singh Guleria passed away quietly at his home in Delhi.

From a village schoolboy to the “doctor’s doctor” of AIIMS, his life remains a quiet lesson: true clinical wisdom rests not only in technology, but in the attentive eye, the listening ear, and the steady hand of a physician who never forgot the person behind the patient.