Dr V Shanta, an oncologist who made cancer hospital her home to ‘give patients all she could’

CHENNAI: For 64 years, Dr V Shanta had made the Cancer Institute her home, in more ways than one. The 94-year-old doctor – the country’s most well-known and loved oncologist -- lived by herself on the top floor of the hospital, in a makeshift home.
For years, she lived out of a single room and then expanded her home to include a living room, bedroom and study. “I don’t need more than this. I like to spend all my waking hours with my patients,” she said when interviewed by The Times of India in 2012.
Dr Shanta, chairperson of the Cancer Institute, died in a private hospital in the city on Tuesday morning. Her body was placed in the Cancer Institute building in Gandhi Nagar, where she joined as a resident medical officer in 1954.
That was the year Dr Shanta had joined her mentor Dr Krishnamurthy, the son of Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy (India’s first woman doctor), at the Cancer Institute WIA. The Institute started with just the two doctors, two nurses and 12 beds. Today, it is an over 400 bed hospital.
Dr Shanta called it the biggest and most wonderful evolution she had been part of in her life. At the Cancer Institute WIA, of the over 400 beds, almost 300 are ‘free’ beds, for patients who cannot afford treatment, in keeping with the institute’s motto to serve those in need.
Right at the very beginning of her career, Dr Shanta said she had made up her mind to dedicate her life to her patients. She felt it gave her patients that much more confidence to know their doctor was right there in the hospital all the time, which was why she chose to live there, “to give them all she could”. It was also the reason she had chosen to remain single.
In the Cancer Institute-WIA, Dr Shanta had said she saw both destiny and opportunity. It was the first comprehensive cancer centre in south India and the second one in the country. Oncology, as a subject, was new terrain in India. It took her more than a decade to get the Medical Council of India to approve oncology as a speciality, with Dr Shanta making yearly ‘pilgrimages’ as she called it to New Delhi to appeal to the MCI.
In her lifetime, Dr Shanta was the recipient of some of the country’s greatest civilian awards -- the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan.
The awards though lay scattered around her house, some shoved behind cupboards. Awards, she said, held no meaning for her. Dr Shanta said she could not even remember the names of some of the awards she had received or where she had kept them.
What she had kept on display though, in a glass case by the entrance to her home, were three conches, hand-painted by a patient of hers, a driver named Narayanan, who would visit her every time he passed through Chennai. Fifty-two years later, she could recount every detail of his case.
“As doctors, we need to remember that every patient has entrusted us with their lives. We need to understand the responsibility we are taking up,” she had said.
No one understood it better than Dr Shanta.