Hope, healing and hospitals: A Deepavali story for all
In 1833, a few months after cholera, a disease endemic to India since 1817, reached French shores for the first time, the very first allopathic dispensary in the city, opened in the Fort area of Bangalore
Tonight, on the darkest night of the month of Karthika, Hindus across India will celebrate Deepavali with great joy and festivity. The festival kicked off two days ago with Dhanteras, the day of Dhanvantari, the god of medicine and healing, who, according to legend, emerged out of the churning of the cosmic ocean bearing a pot of the only real ‘dhan’ – amrit, the elixir of good health and longevity.
Since we are in Dhanvantari season, let us speak today of healers, or more specifically, Baengaluru’s oldest hospitals. In 1833, a few months after cholera, a disease endemic to India since 1817, reached French shores for the first time, a small clinic, the very first allopathic dispensary in the city, opened in the Fort area of Bangalore. Two years before, the kingdom of Mysore had come under direct British rule; it was probably because a large part of the British administration functioned out of Tipu Sultan’s palace in Fort, that this was chosen as the dispensary’s location. That little dispensary grew in organic ways over the next three decades, with wings being added on as they were needed.
In 1861, when Sir Mark Cubbon retired as Commissioner of Mysore and Coorg at the age of 85, the office passed to young Lord Lewin Bentham Bowring, only 38. The new broom brought in sweeping changes – the funds in the Mysore treasury, husbanded so cautiously by Cubbon, began to be used for extensive public works – roads, parks, tanks, churches – in the Bangalore Cantonment. With British attention shifting firmly to the Cantonment, the first civil hospital there opened soon after, in 1868. In honour of the young Commissioner, the hospital was named Bowring Hospital. Designed on the lines of the legendary Hopital Lariboisiere in Paris, built in the aftermath of the cholera pandemic of 1832, the Bowring Hospital grew, by 1890, to a 104-bed hospital, with 24 beds reserved for women patients.
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Meanwhile, in 1881, in a landmark event called the Rendition, the British relinquished direct control of Mysore and placed Chamarajendra Wadiyar X on the throne. The Bangalore Cantonment received the special status of a Civil and Military (C&M) Station, and continued being administered by the British. In 1884, Bowring Hospital was made over to the C&M Station. The same year, feeling the serious lack of a good hospital in the Pete – the area of Bangalore under the Maharaja’s administration, Chamarajendra donated 20 acres of land to a small charitable medical facility that had functioned out of the old jail barracks on Museum Road for decades, urging them to build and run a modern hospital on the land. Set up in 1854 by five French nuns (the French connection again!), the medical facility had rendered yeoman service to the people of Bangalore during the plague pandemic of 1878. Delighted, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd opened the Pete’s first civil hospital two years later on what is today Nrupathunga Road. Its name was St Martha’s Hospital.
1884 was a landmark year in medical care in India in other ways as well – it was the year Lord Dufferin took over as Viceroy. Before she left England, Lady Dufferin was urged by Queen Victoria to look into improving facilities for the medical care of Indian women, especially where childbirth was concerned. She set about it with a passion, establishing a fund that provided medical tuition to female doctors, nurses and midwives, and worked tirelessly to set up hospitals that catered solely to women. Lady Dufferin’s mantle was taken up by the wives of successive Viceroys, but most enthusiastically by Mary Victoria Leiter, the dynamic American wife of Lord Curzon, who was appointed Viceroy in 1899. It was her endowment to the Bowring Hospital that resulted in the founding of the maternity hospital attached to it, the Lady Curzon Hospital.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)