Dr V: the eye hospital that began after retirement

Most careers are supposed to peak somewhere in the middle. Govindappa Venkataswamy’s best-known work began when the government told him to stop. In 1976, at the mandatory retirement age of 58, he opened an eye hospital with 11 beds.¹²

The plan that failed first

He was born in 1918 in Vadamalapuram, in Tamil Nadu. As a child he lost cousins to complications of pregnancy, and he resolved to become a doctor.³ He qualified from Stanley Medical College in Madras in 1944 and joined the Indian Army Medical Corps.¹

Then his body intervened. Rheumatoid arthritis left his fingers permanently deformed, and in 1948 he left the army.¹ The obstetric career he had planned was no longer possible. He retrained in ophthalmology instead, and by 1956 he was head of the department at Madurai Medical College.³

Over the next two decades he built outreach eye camps (from 1960), a rehabilitation centre for the blind and a programme to train ophthalmic assistants. He received the Padma Shri in 1973.¹

The second act

When retirement came, he did not stop. He opened Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, named after the philosopher Sri Aurobindo, with 11 beds, funded by mortgaging his house and by his siblings’ pooled savings.¹² By 1984 it had 200 beds.² Over his lifetime he personally performed more than 100,000 eye operations, with fingers that arthritis had bent.¹²

Outside the hospital, his life was quiet. He never married, lived with his brother’s family, and was a devoted follower of Sri Aurobindo.³²

His own explanation of what drove him is printed on Aravind’s founder page: “Intelligence and capability are not enough. There must be the joy of doing something beautiful.”¹

He died in Madurai in 2006, aged 87.¹

What the path shows

Two lessons sit in this life, and neither is about eyes.

The first is that the plan you make at 25 is not the career you will have. A disability closed one specialty; he found another and became exceptional at it.

The second is that “late” is a strange word in medicine. The work he is remembered for was begun by a retired man with a mortgaged house. Experience, patience and a clear idea of the problem turned out to matter more than youth.