CMC Vellore is a unique place and we are so glad that Sarah was recently selected for admission to CMC Vellore medical school. Sarah joins the long tradition of several others from our extended family who studied and worked at CMC Vellore (I think the following relatives are Vellore alumni: M.T.Saramma , Mary Varghese, Kochithamma, Annamma John, Dr. K.M. John, and Dr. Anna Thomas). CMC Vellore will fit Sarah’s aptitude and background perfectly. We wish her all the best.

I found this fascinating account of CMC Vellore by Dr. T. Howard Somervell (of Everest and Neyyoor fame). (Transcription errors are likely due to the use of OCR. Words or sentences in italics were added by me):

From: Somervell, Dr. T. Howard, (1955), “Knife and Life In India – The Story of a Surgical Missionary at Neyyoor, Tavancore”, (2nd ed., pp. 194-202), Livingston Press, London.

....In 1949 I left Neyyoor, and went to Vellore to serve in that same Medical College (i.e., CMC Vellore), and to use the knowledge and experience gained by twenty-five years of surgical service in India in order to pass it on to Indian medical students and produce qualified Christian doctors. If I had stayed at Neyyoor till retiring age, I should have left behind me but a handful of Indian doctors trained as house-surgeons in Neyyoor Hospital. But at Vellore, which in 1949 was the only Christian Medical College in India, I should have some fifty students every year to whom to impart the knowledge I had gained by treating people in South India and studying their diseases.

So in 1949 I said farewell to Neyyoor. The saying of John the Baptist, "He must increase, and I must decrease" is ever true, and the only chance of developing the responsibility of the coming generation is for the older one to fade out. In this case I had a very definite place whither to fade, and in July 1949 I began life at Vellore.

Sixty years ago (1895) an American missionary, Dr. Scudder, was running a hospital at a place not far from Madras, with the help of a few male assistants. In those days lady doctors were practically unknown in India, and nursing was done by male nurses, for no respectable Indian woman would take up nursing unless she was a widow and thus safe from the sharp tongue of gossip. The doctor's daughter, Ida, was living with him, hoping to go home in a year or two for furlough, and perhaps to get married at home. One evening a man came along, distracted: "O doctor, my wife is having a baby. Some thing has gone wrong. She's in terrible pain. I'm afraid she is going to die." "I'll come along right now," said Dr. Scudder. "O, no," said the man, "that would never do. I am a Muslim, my wife has never seen any man except me, and her own brother. She is in my harem to which no man could possibly be admitted. But is this girl your daughter? Could she help?" Ida Scudder felt acutely that she could do nothing. She was just an ordinary college girl, and knew nothing about medicine and nursing. So the man went back home. And that very night the same thing happened again. Once again Dr. Scudder offered to go and was politely refused. Once again his daughter was asked to go and felt she knew nothing that could help. And next day two funeral processions passed the Scudder's door. Those two women had died, a death of agony that might have been prevented if...

Ida Scudder was a servant of Jesus Christ, and she knew what this meant. She knew that those women represented millions of others, in harems and zenanas, and kept at home by the Purdah system, whose men-folk would never allow a man doctor to come to their aid. So she resolved to go back to America at once and there to take a medical course, and to come out to India and start training women to be doctors and nurses-most of them Christian women if possible-and to go and give help and healing in places where men would not be allowed. Six years later she was out in India again, a qualified doctor, and started work at a house belonging to one of the missions. Later a small hospital of sixty beds or so was built and some training for nurses began; another visit to America and Ida Scudder brought back with her enough money to build a bigger hospital and a college and hostel for women medical students. And for twenty years the work of training educated Indian girls to become doctors went on.

Now the Christian Medical Association, which contains nearly all medical missionaries, and many other Christian doctors in India, has for many years been wanting to establish a medical college for men. Vellore in the South and Ludhiana in the North of India have been producing lady doctors for years under Christian auspices. But only at one place, Miraj near the West coast was there a Christian medical school for men. And Christian boys found it very hard to get into the Government medical colleges, most of which only admitted a few every year, in proportion to the size of the Christian community, which is about 2 or 3 per cent of the population of India. To start a medical college from scratch would cost a million or more - a sum which missionary societies could not hope to find at that time (could they now?). And in 1940 or so the Association decided that the only way of doing this with a hope of success was to add a male side to one of the existing women's colleges. It was obvious that at Vellore the work for women must not be in any way reduced or handicapped; the men's side in hospital, college and hostels must be definitely an addition to the existing women's buildings and classes and beds. Even this plan involved great expense, and its development is not yet finished (1955), but each year twenty-five male students are taken as well as twenty-five girls, and there is good accommodation for all branches of the work - an ample hostel for the 150 or so men which a five-year course for twenty-five students a year involves, a hospital doubled in size to take as many men as women, and new buildings in both hospital and college to accommodate the larger classes in the many subjects of a full medical course. Having been run so long by American missionaries for Indian women, the nucleus of the staff is predominantly Indian and American. But Vellore is now a Union institution, managed by a Council and Board representing almost the total medical missionary effort in India. So now we have on the staff British, Australians, Swedes, Swiss, Danish and other nationalities, all paid on the same scale of rates, all one in the work and in Christ Jesus, all happy as colleagues with one another, and with the Indians who form the bulk of the staff.

In an institution like this, work is of course very different from the work of an ordinary mission hospital. We are departmentalised. No longer have I to exercise oversight over the medical, gynaecological and eye cases. My first job there was to do the work of Dr. Carman who was Professor of Surgery and whose speciality was the kidneys and "genitourinary" organs. I had to spend days revising my knowledge on that branch of work and getting it up-to-date. The chief contribution I was able to make to Vellore was in the field of surgical technique, in which a very large amount of operative surgery, spread over twenty-five years, had given me practice for the hands and brain, and opportunities for developing surgical methods. Few hospitals provide the wealth and variety of surgical conditions that we see in Neyyoor, and I doubt if there is any hospital in the world where so many cases of cancer of the mouth are dealt with annually. But I had not had time to do much reading of surgical papers and had therefore concentrated chiefly on abdominal surgery and orthopaedics, as the two chief branches of surgery that were necesary in South Travancore.

After Dr. Carman's return to Vellore I was able to leave to him the special subject of which he is a master, and the remainder of my time at Vellore has been taken up with these two branches of surgical work - abdominal and orthopaedic in which I had already had so much practice. Although a completely general surgeon such as I had been for twenty-five years has a varied and interesting life, when one is departmentalised and confined to one or two branches bf the art, one can come to know a great deal more about one's particular branch, and do the work much better, and the chances of combining one's curative work with research which will advance the science of surgery are far greater when one is limited to one department, rather than spreading one's energies over the whole field of surgery, and never becoming a master of any particular branch. The same applies to one's teaching. Limitation to a certain field enables one to have more time for teaching, and for ensuring that that teaching is good. At Vellore this is a most important thing, for half our time or more is spent in teaching, which is the distinctive side of the whole work of the Christian Medical College. Our work in the hospital is all combined with the teaching of students. In going round the wards we not only examine our patients and instruct our house-surgeons in their treatment, but we get students to examine them, and much valuable teaching is done at the bedside. The same applies to the out-patient department, which occupies one or two mornings and two afternoons every week. In the operating theatre, too, there is an opportunity of teaching while we operate, and often of getting a member of the junior staff to do the operation while one assists him oneself, and shows him the right way of doing things; the best possible training that a young doctor can have. At VeIlore there are five or six operating theatres, two being for general surgery. All are under the control of Sister Hutchison, a British-trained sister who is very efficient, and one of the hardest workers in the hospital. I am personally assisted in the theatre by a male nurse called Challappan, who was trained in Neyyoor and has been in charge of the operating theatres both there and at Kundara. He came along to VeIlore with me in 1949, and knows my technique and my methods and requirements, so well that I seldom have to say a word during an operation - everything is ready and handed to me just when I want it. This enables me to talk to students or house-surgeons and explain to them the steps of the operation. Challappan also is quite a good rockclimber, and he has often come with me, sometimes with other boys from the medical college or the mission school in Vellore, and climbed up the granite rocks which fortunately decorate the landscape around Vellore, and which provide short but energetic rock-climbs not unlike those on some of my home mountains. And now my son, who joined the staff of Vellore in 1954, will be able to come along, too, if ever we manage to get off work at the same time as one another.

Vellore is a Christian Medical College, and is out to produce Christian doctors. Most of our students are Christians and have come from Christian families, many of them from Travancore, but others from all over India, and even further afield, from Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon. Others are Hindus and Muslims, though these latter are very few. But our desire at Vellore is that the spirit of Jesus Christ should permeate all our work. We must treat people, not merely diseases. We must follow our Master in being always ready to do our best for anyone who requires our help, rich or poor, high or low caste, and it must be our very best, too, for nothing less is worthy of God whose work we believe this work of healing to be. The Christian life of the college, prayers and services in the beautiful and simple domed chapel as well as meetings arranged by the Student Christian Movement or other Christian groups, and Bible classes for all students on Wednesday mornings-all this is of supreme importance. For we want our students to leave the college not only qualified technically as doctors, but ready to go wherever the need is greatest, not where the fees are highest, ready to give themselves to those who need their help in the spirit of Christ the Master of us all.

That will mean in many cases that the doctor produced by Vellore's training will feel he is called to work in a village or country district. For it is in these that the need for doctors is greatest, rather than in the big towns where so many doctors are already in practice, and where fees will be much higher than in the countryside. India's people live in villages and country districts, 83 per cent. of them. Only seventeen out of every hundred are in large towns or industrial areas. And there are more doctors looking after those seventeen in the cities than there are in the countryside where live the eighty-three. So it comes about that, we make a special appeal at Vellore for the countryside. In Neyyoor we looked after the doctorless districts by means of our branch hospitals. In Vellore there are only two branches of this nature - a women's hospital at Gudiyattam some twenty miles away, and a centre with a small hospital, a leprosy clinic and a rural centre with its model village at Kavanur, about fourteen miles from Vellore. But for many years the staff at VeIlore has looked to the needs of the countryside by the method of roadside work. A large bus, fitted up as a dispensary, with stocks of drugs, dressings, food and vitamins, facilities for sterilising and stretchers for serious cases, goes out from Vellore in the early morning twice a week. In it are several doctors including at least one senior one, nurses, students and a leprosy doctor, and physiotherapist. Arrived at a village, they stop under a large tree outside it and there will already be over 100 people waiting at the tree. They start with prayers and then split up into groups---one for medical one for surgical cases, one for leprosy, and a group in the front of the bus for feeding - powdered milk for babies, vitamins and in famine-time as much rice, wheat, or other food as they can get, for those who need it most. Dr. Ida B. Scudder (niece of the founder Dr. Ida) leads one of the roadside parties, and Dr. M. D. Graham (the children's specialist) leads the other. My wife normally goes on both, in the food department, and distributes to the starving people, especially to the children, food provided by U.N.I.C.E.F., the Government, charitable people in Vellore, church collections, and any other available source. During the years 1950-53 the rains had failed and there was much starvation. The first year of failure people may manage to hang on somehow with stocks of rice in shops or granaries, and with the seed they have reserved for sowing. But if the rains fail for a second year there is a real famine. The villages are full of people with scraggy, spindly arms and legs and a belly distended with air - all of them in dire distress. The Government provided a mid-day meal of gruel or broth for many villages, and provided jobs, such as road-making, to give those who had no work a chance of making a little money and buying rice or other food imported into the district. But many of the people were so weak from starvation that they could not work, and some could not even walk along to the nearest gruel-centre, which may be several miles away. So the work of our roadside bus in feeding the starving was urgently needed. Many hundreds must have been kept alive until at last in 1953 rain fell again - people who would otherwise have died of starvation. When the crowd of patients has been dealt with - perhaps 100, in some places nearly 300 - the bus goes on to the next place, three or four miles on-and stops under another tree, where another crowd will already have gathered; and so on throughout the day. In each day's run between 500 and 1,100 people are dealt with. Serious cases are taken back to VeIlore in the evening; those who can make use of bus services are advised or helped to do so; but a great many cases can be dealt with at the roadside and relieved of their ailments well enough to enable them to stay in their village and look after the family or the fields. All the time that the medical and food work is going on, and the leprosy people are getting their sulphone or their physiotherapy for crippled hands, the hospital evangelist will be telling a crowd of people the Bible stories with the aid of a flannelgraph (Flannelgraph - a board covered with flannel on which is painted an outdoor or indoor scene. Flannel figures of people are put on to this and can be changed as the story progresses), and especially telling them of the Great Physician who heals the wounds of the soul and mind, and in whose name this work for the diseases of the body is being done.

Although this job of treating patients on the roadside once a week leaves much to be desired, yet it is a very valuable piece of work. The people in the villages and farms feel that someone cares about them; no doctor lives along the roads or in the villages where our bus goes, and we can at least give them some help and keep a watchful eye on them, and if any serious illness or accident occurs the patients can be taken to Vellore where everything possible can be done for them. The roadside bus gives too a very valuable insight into village conditions, and is an essential part of the education of our students. Many of them come from towns and cities and have no idea of the terrible need of the villages in their own country of India, until they go out in the roadside bus. So we are not surprised that some of our friends outside, such as the District Judge and other officials, have told us that the best work that is done at Vellore is the work of the roadside bus.

But in point of fact there is no part of the work that is the "best". The imperfect treatment of a village patient neat his home; the very latest in surgery done by Dr. Betts, our American chest surgeon; the village dispensary built and run by our students; the services in the wards and in the hospital chapel; the work of the new neuro-surgical block under Dr. Chandy our Indian brain surgeon; the up-to-date X-ray department; the restoration of the function of the crippled hands of lepers that is the speciality of Dr. Brand; the keeping of stores and accounts and the making of furniture and equipment; the well-equipped pathology laboratory and its striking museum; the nursing school and its hard-working staff, and the duties faithfully performed in the wards all day and night by the nurses themselves - who can say which is the best work? All of it is necessary and all of it must be the best we can make it, for it is all, we believe, the work of God; it is all part of the great task of bringing the light of Christ into darkness and health of body and soul where there was formerly disease and frustration.

When I joined it in 1949, Vellore was the only Christian Medical College in India that turned out students trained for university degrees, though there were several others that trained doctors for a lower qualification. These second-grade qualifications are now, rightly or wrongly, stopped by Government order, and one of the Christian medical "schools" which, for many years, has been training women at Ludhiana in the extreme North of India, has recently started work for both men and women on the same lines as Vellore and has become a medical "college" for university degrees. So now we have two Christian medical colleges for India's 400 million inhabitants. Would we had more! For the spirit of Christ is an essential part of the training of a doctor, in my opinion. Knowledge and technical ability and keenness there may be, but just as the whole man is body, mind and soul, so the ideal doctor should be well trained as a healer of the whole man. And where else can he get the spiritual urge that will make him unselfish and kind as well as efficient, except he be trained in a place which is suffused with the spirit and inspired by the example of the Great Physician?

Note: Dr. Somervell, with Mallory, Irving, Odell, and Norton, had come close to reaching the peak of Mt Everest in 1924. The disappearances of Mallory and Irving on the final ascend and the recent discovery of Mallory’s body (1999) are now legends. JBM 8/1/2005