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Google dedicated its doodle to Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy on his 100th birth anniversary on October 1. Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy is an ophthalmologist and a founder of the renowned Hospital named, Aravind Eye Hospital.
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Dr Venkataswamy is best known as Dr V, started a hospital Aravind Eye Hospital way back as a small entity with merely 11 beds, but now it has changed the way ailments related to eyes are treated in the country. Dr Govindappa Venkatswamy born on 1 October 1918 in Tamil Nadu’s Vadamalpuram. When he was 30-year-old, was permanently crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, but he did not care about his own health and continued to do what he wanted to achieve in his life.
Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy had gone to a school located in his village, where students would write on sand which collected from the riverbank as there was no pencil and paper at that time. Later, he had moved to Madurai to study Chemistry at American College. He then earned a degree of M.D. from Stanley Medical College in Madras in 1944.
After completing his medical school, Dr Venkataswamy joined the Indian Army Medical Corps for a career in Obstetrics, it is a branch of medicine related to pregnancy and childbirth. However, he did not spend much time with the Army, as he was cripple with rheumatoid arthritis. It was so severe that Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy had been bedridden for about a year.
However, he returned to medical school and earned a degree in ophthalmology in 1951. He learned the procedures of surgery to remove a cataract, one of the main causes of blindness.
Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy’s blog post by Google reads, “Dr V could perform 100 surgeries in a day. Addressing the problem of blindness in a holistic fashion, he set up eye camps in rural communities, a rehab centre for blind people, and a training program for ophthalmic assistants, personally performing over 100,000 successful eye surgeries.”
In the year 1973, Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy was conferred the Padmashri award for his commendable service to the nation.
Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy formed the Aravind Eye Hospital the in late 1970s. The hospital was financed by doctors mortgaging their homes and donating their own furniture, notes the post by Google. If we talk about the today’s condition of Aravind Eye Hospital, it has almost 4,000 beds performing over 200,000 eye surgeries each year, with 70% of patients paying little or nothing.
Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy had breathed his last on July 7, 2006 at the age of 87.
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