The story of the women’s medical movement in India is, when told at all, generally centered upon its British founding figures - Ida Scudder’s role in founding the Christian Medical College in Vellore in 1900, or Edith Brown’s in founding the Christian Medical College in Ludhiana in 1894 - and while certainly these are individuals whose work and lives we should remember and cherish, the Indian women who inherited and expanded these institutions in the years after 1947 are hardly known outside of India in spite of their decades of devoted medical service.
Partly, it is human nature to hold in our memories landmark founding moments and to then let our attentions drift when it comes to those with the longer term task of maintaining and evolving those institutions, but there are some individuals for whom the little bit of extra mental effort simply must be made, and Dr. Hilda Lazarus (1890-1978) is decidedly one such.
In 1948 she became the first Indian to assume the directorship of the CMC in Vellore, assuming the responsibility for bringing Scudder’s organization into the era of Indian independence. Her success in this can be attributable to a lifetime of experience negotiating the space between Indian and Western practices and institutions. Her grandparents were converts to Christianity, her maternal grandfather having been the first Indian missionary ordained by the London Missionary Society, and her paternal grandfather having had changed the family name to Lazarus to signify his devotion to his new belief system. Hilda’s generally prosperous parents and grandparents experienced the mix of privilege and prejudice that came with being a Christian family in an overwhelmingly Hindu region of the nation - the access to opportunities in England not extended to all Indians, combined with the inevitable accusations of having betrayed their native beliefs.
Hilda was born the eleventh of twelve children in a progressive family of means, her father an educator who brought Montessori’s methods to South India, and her mother an accomplished linguist. The high school overseen by her father was attended by all her siblings, and prepared her well for her science courses at Madras University, where in one class she was the only woman among five hundred men. She obtained her first degree in 1910 at the age of twenty, with a special gold medal for high accomplishment in midwifery.
Wasting no time, she obtained her Bachelor of Surgery degree by 1915 and her Medical Certificate the following year. Somewhere around this time she met and became engaged to an army doctor, Lieutenant Ramon, who was dragged into the British war effort along with over a million other young Indians who had hoped that service would bring post-war independence. Ramon was killed in 1917, and Hilda would wear a white sari with a black patch of mourning for the rest of her life, except for the years of the Second World War when her government service required her to wear khaki.
She was not, however, an individual to wallow in inactivity when work was to be done, and in 1917 she took herself to Ireland and England to continue her medical education, joining the Royal College of Surgeons, and becoming the first Indian woman to sign with the Women’s Medical Service for India, which sent her to Bengal (1918), Surat (1919), and ultimately to Madras (1923), where she took up the superintendency of the Purdah Hospital for Women and Children, a position she held until 1937. Here she came hard against caste restrictions which required that women of high and low caste be kept in separate wards of the hospital. Feeling that this was both morally wrong and impeded all patients getting equal and fair medical attention, she abolished segregation in the institution. She served as equal parts surgeon, obstetrician, gynecologist, and administrator, keeping her doctors and nurses to a high professional standard while expanding the institution.
Lazarus was keenly aware of the need to keep constantly on top of medical reforms in the Western world, and just as she had toured Ireland and England in 1917 to observe modern practice, she returned to London in 1930 to both catch up on new trends and accept full membership in the Royal College of Physicians, and then in 1937 did a tour through the United States and Canada to familiarize herself with developments there in the running and maintenance of large scale medical facilities. Returning to India, she joined the Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi as principal, a position she held from 1938 to 1943. This was an all women’s institution staffed by members of the Women’s Medical Service, and once again Hilda was the only Indian in a sea of English staff. Here she was known for her inexhaustible energy, working both as a gynecological surgeon and rigorous enforcer of standards, regularly inspecting the facilities on sweeping bicycle tours of the institution, and holding the staff to strict standards of dress and hygiene, creating a model institution that was sought out by high government officials for private care.
With the coming of the Second World War, it was inevitable that Lazarus’s medical knowledge would be tapped by her nation for the war effort, and in 1943 she was duly requested to join the Indian Medical Service, receiving a commission as Lieutenant Colonel and servicing as both Chief Medical Officer of the Women’s Medical Service, and assistant director general for the Indian Medical Service’s Women’s Branch. She travelled all over India, overseeing the direction of the nation’s women’s hospitals, and the supervision of the nation’s pool of talented women doctors. One of my favorite stories of this period, that speaks directly to who Dr. Lazarus was as a human being, concerns the rickshaw drivers whose job it was to transport people back and forth from the government offices she kept during the summer months in the Himalayas. This was hard, back-breaking work, lugging humans and luggage up steep, craggy roads, and seeing the suffering that the rickshaw drivers regularly experienced just to make enough money to feed their families, she made the administrative decision to establish a medical dispensary just for them, to see to their unique medical needs, manned by her during her exceedingly limited time off from work.
Lazarus’s government service came to an end in 1947 when she accepted the position of principal at the Christian Medical College of Vellore, soon followed by her historic Directorship of that institution. The organization had been established by Ida Scudder (1870-1960) in 1900 as a single-bed dispensary after Scudder witnessed three Indian women dying in childbirth because they were prevented by social codes from being treated by a male physician. She expanded the facilities over the decades, developed training programs for nurses, and in 1938 established the school as a degree-awarding college affiliated with Madras University. In 1946, the year before Hilda’s arrival, a College of Nursing was founded there, the first in the nation.
Lazarus was inheriting an institution experiencing rapid expansion and success thanks to the work of Scudder and her successor, the famed leprologist Dr. RG Cochrane (1899-1985), but with typical energy and forward-thinking she saw there was more to be done. She invited global partnership through the establishment in 1950 of the International Friends of Vellore, planned facilities to support the new (as of 1947) co-educational status of the institution, and was planning a children’s hospital, new electrical upgrades, and new living quarters for nurses and students, all while giving lectures in gynecology and obstetrics, quelling conflicts between a diverse and fractious group of international staffers, mastering multiple languages to improve her communication with other doctors and patients (an ability inherited from her linguistic mother), and laying the groundwork in staffing and mission that would go into the formation of the Community Health department in 1957, which today provides medical services to some two hundred medical villages around Vellore.
In 1954, Lazarus stepped down from her directorship (and in fact, the institution would not find a successor for her until 1964), but not from medical work. She returned to her family home in Visakhapatnam, to live on the old Lazarus estate with her unwed sister Gladys and provide a stable place for family gatherings, while herself traveling the world on lecture tours and lending her services to the medical community there.
Her half century and more of medical service to her country was deep and well-honored in her own time. Her awards included the CBE, the Kaisar-i-Hind, the Padma Sri, the Obstetrics and Gynecological Society of Bengal Medal, the Bharati Lakshmi, and the Red Cross Medal in recognition of her life of medical work and devotion. Living together with Gladys in the 1970s, she undertook the chairmanship of the high school her father had founded and she had attended, and after Gladys’s passing, she enjoyed visits of old friends and her extensive family, celebrating her eighty-eighth birthday on the 23rd of January, 1978, and passing away that night.
FURTHER READING: There are of course a couple of pages on Lazarus in Anjana Chattopadhyay’s essential reference Women Scientists in India (2018), but a more thorough account can be found in the memories of her collected together by her descendents and co-workers and published by the Friends of Vellore. It is not an easy book to track down (thank you to Ruth Tuckwell of the Friends of Vellore for getting me a copy for this piece!) but worth it if you can get it!
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