Word: dass
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Every 40 Seconds. "It's a kind of madness with me, this removing cataracts," said grizzled Dr. Mathra Dass Pahwa, 71, last week. But it was a madness full of method. Local doctors believe that cataracts and other eye troubles are commoner in the Bihar area than anywhere on earth. Just out of medical school in Lahore back in 1902, Dr. Dass determined to do something about it. His first eye operation, he remembers, was "terrible." But in three years, he had improved considerably. "I spent my own money sending people out to villages to bring me cataract patients...
Dust floated thickly in the air of the canvas tent that was Dr. Dass's operating theater in Darbhanga last week. Amid a raucous babble of several hundred patients, squatting on their haunches to await their turns at one of the makeshift operating tables, sweating coolies carried off postoperative patients at the rate of one a minute. As each new patient was placed on the table, an assistant washed the clouded eye with a mercury solution and applied a few drops of anesthetic. Then, while another assistant held a flashlight, the surgeon slipped his knife into the patient...
Miracle Enough. Using this rapid technique, Dr. Dass officiates at an average of 15 eye clinics throughout India every year. Free to the patients, the clinics are paid for by local institutions and public-spirited citizens. At the end of two weeks' care in the tent-hospitals, his patients get a pair of thick eyeglasses to replace their natural lenses, and are sent home. Each patient also gets a questionnaire to fill out and send in later for the doctor's records, but few bother...