K.V. Thiruvengadam, renowned physician and teacher of medicine, passed away on Saturday due to illness. He was 94.
According to T.V. Devarajan, senior consultant physician, Apollo Hospitals, who was closely associated with him, Dr. Thiruvengadam was ailing for the past few days, following which he was admitted to a private hospital in the city.
A physician and a specialist in chest diseases, asthma and allergies, Prof. Thiruvengadam, who is fondly known as Prof. KVT, is widely known for his teaching, clinical acumen and patient-centric approach. He graduated from the Government Stanley Medical College (SMC) in 1950. He served as a professor of medicine in SMC and Madras Medical College. Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, in a press release, said he was a teacher for nearly 31 years and moulded several students into good doctors. He underwent training in chest diseases abroad.
He was the recipient of prestigious awards. He received Padma Shri for his contribution to the field of medicine and the Dr. B.C. Roy Award.
‘Teacher of teachers’
Many of his students recalled their association with the “master physician”. A student of SMC from 1964 to 1974 (MBBS and MD), Dr. Devarajan said Prof. KVT was a teacher of teachers, very kind, polite, soft-spoken and considerate towards the poor. “He has taught thousands of medical students. He was an excellent clinician and academic, his diagnosis of patients was great and he used to spend nearly an hour for a patient. He mastered both medicine and English literature,” he said. When Dr. Devarajan wrote a textbook of medicine recently, it was Prof. KVT who penned the foreword.
He always laid emphasis on history-taking of patients, said M.A.C.S. Rajendran, general surgeon. “He used to tell us that history-taking would take you to diagnosis and clinical examination would complete the diagnosis. He always insisted that we patiently listen to what a patient is saying, allow him/her to talk,” he said. A student of the 1957-batch of SMC, he recalled the “bedside clinics” during Prof. KVT’s ward rounds. “He used to stop at the bedside of all patients and discuss their condition. If a patient had a heart problem, he used to teach us the heart murmurs and do a clinical examination. These clinics were an integral part of teaching in the wards,” he recounted.
R. Surendran, former director, Institute of Surgical Gastroenterology, SMC, said, “He always gave importance to research in medicine. During my MBBS days (1969 batch), we had two textbooks of medicine, and he was so knowledgeable that we used to say that Prof. KVT was equal to Price’s Textbook of Medicine, plus Harrison’s Textbook of Medicine.”
According to Subramanian Srinivasan, a consultant in infectious diseases, Prof. KVT was a larger than life figure in the medical careers of many of his students at SMC and Madras Medical College. “I was fortunate to have been a student in the early 70s. It is refreshing to have grown with him, to listen and examine the patient, to arrive at a diagnosis and to learn the methods used at bedside... This is in contrast to the current medical practice where there is too much reliance on diagnostic techniques. We have lost a great teacher and a clinician. He will be missed by his patients and students, and his loss is irreplaceable,” he said.
Dr. Thiruvengadam’s wife Dr. Malathi passed away recently. He is survived by his two sons and a daughter.