The Woman Who Ran AIIMS

Dr Sneh Bhargava, born in 1930, is one of the first Indian women to qualify as a radiologist.She was the very first and, so far, only woman to head AIIMS in its decades-long history. On her first day on the job as AIIMS director, in 1984, Dr Bhargava had to deal with a monumental crisis: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been shot and was brought to AIIMS. In this book, we get a riveting first-hand account of this harrowing story and other gripping tales from the annals of medicine.

Dr Bhargava was in the room when the invention of the CT scanner was announced in the US in the early 1970s. It was she who convinced the higher-ups in the Indian government to bring the CT scanner to India. Up until that point, the only way to look inside a patient’s body was to do an X-ray or to cut them open. This book is chock-full of intriguing stories from a bygone era – from the time radium needles, used to treat cancers, mysteriously went missing from Lady Hardinge Medical College to when Dr Bhargava diagnosed a sitting president with lung cancer using only an X-ray image.

After she retired from AIIMS in 1990, Dr Bhargava went on to play a pivotal role in the establishment of two top hospitals in New Delhi. She was forced into retirement in her 90s, when COVID-19 regulations meant she could no longer go into the hospitals for work.She used the newly acquired free time to write this frank and candid book, one of the best memoirs from a pioneer of Indian medicine. This is not just the story of her extraordinary life but is, equally, the story of the medical profession in post-Independence India, and an illustration of what it means to truly live a life of service.

Sneh Bhargava, MD, a recipient of the Padma Shri, is professor emeritus of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. She was director of AIIMS from 1984 to 1990. After retiring from AIIMS, Dr Bhargava served as medical director of Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research and as chair of the department of radiology at Dharamshila Narayana Super Specialty Hospital, both in New Delhi.