K.C. Chaudhuri

K. C. Chaudhuri is generally described as the founder of paediatrics as a distinct discipline in India, and was probably the first Indian physician to restrict his practice to children. He worked at a time when paediatrics was not recognised as a speciality of medicine at all, and much of his effort went into building the institutions that would make it one.

He began with a journal. In 1933 he founded the Indian Journal of Pediatrics in Calcutta, the first independent paediatric journal in the country, and edited it himself until 1955, after which Amala Chaudhuri continued the work. In 1948 he started the Indian Pediatric Society, arguing that general practitioners with an interest in children should be admitted as full members and that paediatrics should hold its own annual conferences rather than meet as an appendage to other specialities; his campaign for a single professional body led to the merger of the society with the Association of Pediatricians of India in 1963 to form the Indian Academy of Pediatrics.

His largest undertaking was the Institute of Child Health in Kolkata, the first paediatric institute in India. Its foundation stone was laid on 12 August 1954 and construction began in April 1955, once the Corporation of Calcutta had sanctioned an L-shaped building of some 11,000 square feet. The outpatient department, with its own laboratory, opened on 23 January 1956 and the fifty-bed inpatient department on 15 June that year, with facilities for newborns; Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated the institute on 16 January 1957. Chaudhuri's stated intention was not simply a children's hospital but an integrated institution combining promotive, preventive and curative services with teaching and research, treating a child's emotional, intellectual and physical needs and social setting together — a formulation of total child care he set out for the first time in India.[2][3][4]