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BOOKS
AUTHORSPEAK
Farokh Erach Udwadia
Doctor
Of Ethics
A
profusion of degrees jostle for space on his nameplate and yet,
Mumbai-based consultant physician and 1987 Padma Bhushan awardee Dr Farokh
Erach Udwadia, 70, talks emphatically of a lacuna in his education. "History,"
declares Udwadia, the author of Man And Medicine: A History (Oxford),
"is the subject that most doctors have surprisingly limited information
on. But its awareness is crucial not just to physicians, but also to laymen."
 Inspiration
for the book struck during brainstorming sessions at a bioethics conference
at Goa, when the soft-spoken doctor felt he just had to "put down"
his thoughts on paper. The result of a year of late nights (made tougher
by the fact that he hadn't taken time off from his general practice) and
help from his wife, is a heavy tome that helps the man who authored five
medical books to break away from his orthodox "physician-writer"
image. Udwadia's past works like Principles of Critical Care may have
been for academics, but with this book he hopes to reach out to general
readers. "I want patients to understand that no cure is infallible.
That doctors aren't God. I hope they realise this when they read about
the great trials and errors shaping modern medicine," he says. For
a reader then, this is a deliberately uncomplicated work with the promise
of sepia-toned history. For the author, it remains an essentially exploratory
journey, one in which he fulfils his dream of following the medicinal
trail from prehistoric to contemporary times.
The work is rendered more individualistic by
two sections. In the somewhat breezy "Western Medicine in India"
Udwadia proffers a thought-provoking question: "where would Indian
medicine have been if the British hadn't ruled India?" While in "The
Future", he discusses medical ethics, spelling out the warning, "Bioethics
is an uncharted sea. We need to map and charter this sea if humanity is
not to be wrecked on its shoals and reefs." It's also a theme whose
threads Udwadia hopes to pick up again to weave into a bigger work in
the future.
-Natasha Israni
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