When we met Dr V. Shanta, she was engrossed in Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee's bestselling book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. “It is an inspiration. I love reading a few parts of the book again and again,” she says.
Shanta's first encounter with cancer was in 1955, when she joined Adyar Cancer Institute in Chennai. After completing her postgraduation in obstetrics and
gynaecology, Shanta wrote the Madras Public Service Commission exam. She cleared the exam and was offered the post of assistant surgeon in Women and Children's Hospital in Chennai. She instead chose to join the Cancer Institute as its resident medical officer. “One of those little rooms used to be mine,” says Shanta, pointing to a small room with a yellow glass door on the first floor of the institute.
“Cancer is as complex as life. Cancer is a challenge and setting up a not-for-profit institute was a bigger challenge but I believe that one has to face these challenges as one faces life,” she says.
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Right from her school days, Shanta wanted to be a doctor. “My first posting after MBBS was in a cancer unit in a general hospital. Fellow doctor Dr Krishnamurthy's mother Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy was the first woman medical graduate in the country. After Reddy's sister died of cancer in 1923, she wanted to do something for cancer patients.”
In 1954, the mother-son duo set up the Adyar Cancer Institute. A year later, Shanta joined for a salary of Rs 200. It was a 12-bed hospital with two doctors, nurses and technicians each. Now, it is a 500-bed hospital that provides free treatment to 60 per cent of its patients.
Cancer treatment in the 1950s, says Shanta, was about surgery and conventional high voltage radiation. People were afraid of it as it used to burn the skin, too. Medical oncology was unheard of. The cobalt unit was the first advancement that came in the mid-50s. “W.J. Green, sales manager at Atomic Energy Centre in Canada, was going from one country to another to sell the machine. He decided to come to Chennai to our centre. I clearly remember that day,” says Shanta. “Krishnamurthy called me frenetically and asked me to rush to the hospital. He said some gentleman from Canada was coming, and wanted me to be by his side.”
Though the centre didn't have the money to buy the machine, Krishnamurthy was optimistic. Green was possibly impressed with the kind of work that we were doing and requested Krishnamurthy to buy one unit,” says Shanta. “Krishnamurthy told him that though we needed it, we didn't have the money to buy it. In December that year, we got a telegram from Canada saying that they wanted to donate a unit to us.” The Tamil Nadu government, too, decided to give an annual grant of Rs 1 lakh.
The real advancement in cancer treatment, however, happened between 1965 and 1975, says Shanta. But most of them didn't come to pre-liberalised India. Another major challenge before the doctors, says Shanta, was that most patients came to them quite late, with untreatable stages of cancer. So, she decided to start a preventive oncology programme which, Shanta claims, was initiated 20 years before the government came up with a similar programme.
In fact, it was Shanta who convinced the Medical Council of India to introduce cancer as a multi-speciality branch of study.
