The Wheelchair Surgeon Who Built India’s First Rehabilitation Institute: The Story of Dr. Mary Verghese

Mary Puthisseril Verghese was born on 21 May 1925 in Cochin, Kerala. Inspired by the life and work of Dr. Ida Scudder, she joined the Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, and graduated MBBS in the early 1950s. She had set her heart on becoming a gynaecologist.

On 30 January 1954, while travelling with colleagues, the car she was in met with a serious accident. Mary sustained a complete spinal cord injury that left her permanently paralysed from the waist down—paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Her medical career appeared to have ended almost before it began.

Yet her spirit refused to break. Her mentor, the renowned reconstructive surgeon Dr. Paul Brand, encouraged her to continue. He trained her to perform delicate hand surgery for patients with leprosy while seated in her wheelchair. She became known as the world’s first “wheelchair surgeon.” After further rehabilitation in Australia, she travelled to New York and completed specialised training in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation under the pioneering Dr. Howard Rusk, earning Diplomate status of the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in 1962.

Returning to Vellore, she established India’s first Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation with inpatient facilities at CMC. On 5 January 1963 the department was formally inaugurated by President Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Three years later, on 26 November 1966, her greater dream materialised: the country’s first inpatient Rehabilitation Institute opened its doors. It offered comprehensive care—medical, physical, psychological and vocational—for people with spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, strokes, amputations, cerebral palsy and the disabilities of leprosy and polio.

Dr. Mary Verghese insisted that rehabilitation must restore independence and dignity. She promoted vocational training, affordable mobility aids and sports for the disabled. Patients who saw her working from a wheelchair found living proof that disability need not mean the end of a purposeful life.

In 1972 the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri. The following year the Indian Council of Medical Research honoured her with the Dr. P. N. Raju Oration Award for her research on the rehabilitation of paraplegics and quadriplegics—the first such recognition in the field in India. She later founded the Mary Verghese Trust to support the physically disabled.

She retired in 1976 but continued to raise funds and advocate for those with disabilities until her death on 17 December 1986 at the age of sixty-one. Today the Mary Verghese Institute of Rehabilitation at CMC Vellore continues her work, treating hundreds of patients every year. Her biography, Take My Hands by Dorothy Clarke Wilson, has inspired generations.

Dr. Mary Verghese remains a luminous example of courage, faith and determination—the physician who turned personal tragedy into a lifelong mission to restore hope and independence to countless others.