In the bustling lanes of Calcutta, on a cool December morning in 1915, a boy named Prafulla Kumar Sen entered the world. The only son of a civil servant in a middle-class Bengali family, he grew up with one sister and the quiet expectation that he would make something meaningful of his life. His father, a man of discipline and public duty, often said, “Prafulla, a life of service is the only life worth living.” The boy listened, wide-eyed, already dreaming of the operating theatre long before he understood what one truly was.

His early schooling took place in the modest municipal school of Jamtada, a small town in Bihar. Later he moved to Victoria College of Sciences in Nagpur. The classrooms were simple, the books worn, yet Prafulla’s mind raced ahead. “One day,” he told a classmate under a neem tree, “I will open the chest and hold a beating heart in my hands.” The friend laughed. “You talk like a madman, Sen.” Prafulla only smiled. “Perhaps. But someone has to try.”

In 1933 he entered Seth G.S. Medical College in Bombay. By 1938 he had earned his MBBS; two years later, in 1940, he took his Master of Surgery with distinction from the University of Bombay. The country was still under British rule, the future uncertain, yet the young surgeon’s hands were already steady. He joined King Edward Memorial Hospital and Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College, the same institution where so many Indian medical pioneers would leave their mark.

In the early 1950s he travelled to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. There, among the latest techniques and research laboratories, he met Marie Barnes, an American physiologist working in a lab. Their conversations began with science and soon deepened into something warmer. “You speak of the heart as if it were a poem,” Marie once said to him over coffee. Prafulla looked at her with quiet intensity. “It is. The most honest poem the body ever writes.” They married in 1954. They had no children of their own, yet the wards of KEM Hospital became filled with the students and patients who felt like family.

Back in Bombay, Dr. Sen set about building something that did not yet exist in India: a true department of cardiothoracic surgery. He founded it at KEM, and decades later that department would bear his name. In 1952 he performed India’s first intracardiac operation—a closed mitral valvotomy—by carefully pushing his finger through a rheumatic mitral valve. Colleagues watched in tense silence. When the procedure succeeded, one young doctor whispered, “Sir… you just changed everything.” Sen wiped his brow and replied simply, “We have only begun.”

The following year he repaired a coarctation of the aorta. By 1956–57 he had closed an atrial septal defect using hypothermia and inflow occlusion. In March 1962 he performed the same operation with the aid of extracorporeal circulation. Each step was hard-won in a country still building its medical infrastructure. He experimented tirelessly on animal models, perfected techniques of transmyocardial acupuncture for ischaemic hearts (work that would later inspire laser revascularisation decades afterwards), and developed new approaches to aortic arch replacement.

Then came the moment that placed him among the world’s surgical pioneers. On 16 February 1968 (some records note the 17th), after years of preparation, cadaver studies, and team training, Dr. Prafulla Kumar Sen led the first human heart transplant in India—and only the sixth in the world. He became the fourth surgeon on the planet to attempt the procedure, following Christiaan Barnard, Norman Shumway, and Adrian Kantrowitz. The operating theatre at KEM was electric with tension. As the donor heart was placed and the final sutures completed, Sen looked up at his team—surgeons like T.P. Kulkarni, G.B. Parulkar, and M.D. Kelkar—and said quietly, “Now we wait… and we hope.” The patient survived only a few hours. A second transplant followed later that year with similar results. Yet the attempt itself was historic. India had stepped onto the global stage of cardiac transplantation.

In the quiet hours after that first operation, a young resident found Sen standing alone, staring at the empty theatre. “Sir, we did not succeed fully,” the resident said. Sen turned, his face tired but resolute. “Success is not only measured in hours of life, beta. It is measured in the courage to try when no one else has. Tomorrow we will learn more. And the day after that, someone will live longer because we dared.”

He continued to teach, operate, and innovate. He served as President of the Association of Surgeons of India in 1971–72. In 1969 the nation recognised his pioneering contributions with the Padma Bhushan. He also received the Vishinsky Medal from the Soviet Union. Students remembered him not only as a brilliant surgeon but as a poet and painter whose lectures sometimes wandered into philosophy and medical history. “A surgeon must have the hands of a craftsman and the heart of a poet,” he would tell them. “Otherwise the knife becomes only a tool, never an instrument of hope.”

In his later years he practised as a consultant at Calcutta Hospital and Research Centre. On 22 July 1982, at the age of sixty-six, that remarkable heart—the one that had given so many others a second chance—stopped after a myocardial infarction. He died in Calcutta, the city of his birth.

Today the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at KEM Hospital carries his name. The Association of Surgeons of India established the Dr. P.K. Sen Memorial Oration in 1993 so that his memory continues to inspire. Young surgeons still hear the stories: the first closed mitral valvotomy, the early open-heart procedures, the audacious transplant of 1968.

And somewhere, in the quiet of an operating theatre, a senior consultant might still say to a nervous resident, “Steady hands, clear mind, and the courage to try. That is the legacy of Dr. Prafulla Kumar Sen. Now go—open the chest, and listen to the poem that is waiting for you.”