Dr. V. Ramalingaswami

Vulimiri Ramalingaswami became Founder Professor and Head of the Department of Pathology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1957, and later Director of the Institute. The list of centres established during his stewardship reads as a map of modern Indian medicine: the Rotary Cancer Centre, the Cardio-thoracic Centre, the Neurosciences Centre, the Centre for Community Medicine, and new departments spanning gastroenterology, human nutrition, endocrinology, biomedical engineering, haematology, nephrology, paediatric surgery and biotechnology.

Born in Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, he completed his MBBS in 1944 and MD in 1946 before a scholarship took him to Oxford, where he took a DPhil in 1951 and a DSc in 1967. He had returned to India in 1947 to work at the Nutrition Research Laboratory at Coonoor in the Nilgiris, studying the diseases that actually afflicted the population around him: nutritional anaemia, iodine deficiency disorders, protein-energy malnutrition, tropical liver disease.

That work had a consequence most pathologists never achieve. As Director-General of the Indian Council of Medical Research after leaving AIIMS, he persuaded the Indian government that endemic goitre could be addressed by fortifying common salt with iodine — a laboratory finding converted into national policy, and into the everyday health of tens of millions of people.

He was President of the Indian Academy of Sciences from 1979 to 1980, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Pathologists. The Karolinska Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate. The Royal Society published a full biographical memoir on his death in 2001 — a distinction extended to very few pathologists from any country.