Tag Archives: Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari – ‘Free Doctor’ of Delhi

Remembering the freedom fighter who grafted animal testicles onto humans to help build India

UTTAR PRADESH / NEW DELHI :

Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari was a staunch Congressman and author of a book titled ‘Regeneration in Man’. Wednesday marks his 81st death anniversary.

Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari was a freedom fighter who also grafted animal  testicles onto humans

India’s political leadership during the British Raj was dominated by lawyers and journalists. A noted exception was Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari (1880-1936), one of Delhi’s richest men, who dexterously balanced his busy medical practice with a deep involvement with politics.

Ansari was a close companion of Gandhi and an icon of the Khilafat movement. The few scholars who have studied his life have focused solely on his role as a Congress leader, and on his skills on the negotiating table of high politics. His exploits with the scalpel have been ignored. More than 80 years after he died, on May 10, 1936, it is remarkable that forget any serious study, there is hardly any discussion about the hundreds of operations he conducted in India in which he grafted animal testicles – from bulls, monkeys and sheep – onto human beings.

Adviser to princes

Dr Ansari studied at Queen’s Collegiate school in Benares and at the Muir Central College in Allahabad (which was later incorporated into Allahabad University). He later joined the Nizam College in Hyderabad where he was given a scholarship in 1900 to study medicine in the UK. After earning a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, he worked in London at Charing Cross hospital, the Lock Hospital and St Peter’s Hospital. He returned to India in 1910, and set up his practice in Calcutta before shifting to Delhi.

He acted as medical adviser to the princes of Alwar, Rampur, Joara and Bhopal. His two older brothers were well-known hakims, who practised the traditional unani system of medicine. They were close to the scholars at the respected Islamic school in Deoband. His own circumstances and family background proved crucial in his positioning as a key functionary during the Khilafat movement of 1919. This movement was launched by Indian Muslims to urge the British government to preserve the authority of the Turkish Sultan as Caliph of Islam with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

A new science

Along with his political activity, Ansari turned his mind to a matter that has obsessed physicians for centuries: the quest for medical interventions to help ageing clients produce heirs. In the early 20th century, medical journals in Europe and America were increasingly documenting cases of xenotransplantation – the transplantation of living cells, tissue or organs from one species to another. It was through such articles that Ansari became interested in this field.

In his role as a medical practitioner, Ansari was also constantly faced with a large number of patients suffering from a “real or imaginary decline in their mental, physical and sexual powers”. His brothers attempted to treat such with traditional medicines. But Ansari looked to Europe for possible answers.

In 1921, 1925 and 1932 he visited Vienna, Paris, Lucerne and London and spent a considerable amount of time in laboratories, hospitals and clinics. He met and observed urologist Dr Robert Lichenstern, Eugen Steiach, Dr Serge Voronoff  – all of whom are considered pioneers in the field of grafting animal testicles onto humans. He also collected vast amounts of literature on the subject, sourcing books and journals from Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria and the US.

This procedure may now be ridiculed but in the Roaring Twenties there was quite the rush of men wanting to undergo these regenerative surgeries. Ansari offered a treatment to his clientele in India that was only available to the elite in the West.

Rejuvenating the nation

According to Ansari, there were a few key reasons why the people of India suffered from poor health. These included unhygienic surroundings, poverty and the lack of medical facilities, as well as seclusion and segregation of the sexes, and rules confining the choice of marriage partner to a limited circle.

In his 1927 presidential address to the Congress in Madras, he dwelt on the problem of healthcare in India.

He said:

“Sixty percent of the revenues of India is absorbed by the Military Department in the name of Defence of the country but the government ought to know that there can be no defence of the country when people are allowed to exist in such a state of utter physical degeneration. The real defence lies in tackling the problem of manhood and improving the general health of the nation.”

In the last decade of his life, Ansari conducted such testicle grafting operations on around 700 people. These included property agents, merchants, jewellers, bankers, provincial civil servants, sportsmen and labourers.

In a letter to Aziz Ansari, his cousin, the doctor wrote that Eugen Steinach “urged me to publish my researches (sic) and not to hide my light under the bushel”.

Ansari meticulously noted down around 440 cases of grafting that he had done. He monitored or kept in touch with these individuals for a period of three to four years after the surgery. In one case, he wrote that a wrestler whose testicles were badly damaged by an opponent and lost his “sexual power” for eight years underwent grafting and found that his sexual appetite was restored. In another case, a man in his early 50s, who was a heavy drinker and had contracted sexual diseases in his 30s, found his health to be deteriorating drastically. After Ansari grafted slices of a bull’s testicles onto the man’s gonads, he gained weight, became healthy, and started leading a normal life with a new wife. Through such case studies, Ansari emphasised that his surgeries resulted in the rejuvenation of patients, which added to the productivity of the nation.

He gave Gandhi a copy of his book Regeneration in Man, who read it with great interest in one day. Describing it as evidence of “research and great labour”, Gandhi, whose aversion to western medical practices is well known, asked his friend: “What is revival of youth worth if you cannot be sure of persistent physical existence for two consecutive seconds?”

But for the short, well-built, moustachioed doctor who played the role of Othello in a play while a student at the University of Edinburgh, these procedures were part of a larger vision for a “universal campaign against the disability of old age”.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home / by Danish Khan / May 10th, 2017

A doctor and his legacy

NEW DELHI :

Taking up the challenging task of achieving unity and tolerance

M.H. Ansari viewing an exhibition on Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari at the M.F. Hussain Art Gallery, 2015
M.H. Ansari viewing an exhibition on Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari at the M.F. Hussain Art Gallery, 2015

Fifty-six is no age to die. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, MD, MS, with a tall reputation in London’s Lock Hospital and Charing Cross Hospital, and ‘free Doctor’ to uncountable poor in Delhi, was on a train bringing him back to his hometown, Delhi, from Mussoorie where he had gone to treat the Nawab of Rampur when, on May 10, 1936, a heart attack – his first and fatal – took him away. He was four years short of sixty.

Doctors are human and death’s sudden grasp comes to medical luminaries just as it comes to ordinary mortals. Ansari must have been in some disbelief at his heart’s capitulation. But his death shocked a whole world beyond himself, a world of grateful and trusting patients, former patients, friends, families of patients, countless Congress and Muslim League leaders who were his patients, some of them, and fellow freedom fighters, all. For he had been more, incredibly more, than the ‘good Doctor sahib‘. He had been, for over two decades, a political guide and pathfinder to all those who believed in India’s plural integrity and in India’s destiny as a leader of progressive causes globally.

The Balkan War in 1912 saw 32-year-old Ansari lead a medical team from India to Turkey to help wounded Turkish forces in what was not just a humanitarian act but one that formed lasting bonds, as the medical mission of the doctor, Dwarkanath Kotnis, to China in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese war was to do. The Kotnis Mission has been the subject of a film, Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani by V. Shantaram, for which K.A. Abbas wrote the script. A film has to come on Dr. Ansari Ki Amar Kahani about that mission’s work. Mrinal Sen could well have made such a film a decade ago but perhaps Javed Akhtar or Shyam Benegal will yet do it, for it cries out, filmographically and civilizationally, to be done.

M.A. Ansari’s life as such needs to be known, not for his sake – he is beyond the reach of recognition or neglect – but ours. Being invited to play a constructive political role in the formulation of the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League in 1916 and to preside over the Muslim League’s sessions in 1918 and 1920, Ansari emerged as a sturdy champion of the Khilafat Movement and Hindu-Muslim unity.

His commitment to that cause soon steered away from League politics, the separate electorates idea and all that was to lead to the demand for Pakistan. This resulted in his becoming inevitably, a general secretary of the Indian National Congress in 1920, 1922, 1926, 1929, 1931 and 1932 and in 1927, its president. A former president of the Muslim League becoming president of the Indian National Congress? Incredible, but incredible things did happen in Gandhi’s and Nehru’s India.

Drawing close to the Mahatma’s eclectic nationalism, Ansari became Gandhi’s ‘Delhi host’ in his old Delhi manor called ‘Darussalam’ and physician to members of Gandhi’s family, including his grandson, Rasik, son of Harilal Gandhi, who contracted typhoid in 1929 while on a visit to Delhi (from eating roadside jalebis, as Rasik himself explained) and in spite of Ansari’s valiant efforts, could not be saved. Gandhi was touring the North West Frontier at the time. Ansari sent him a telegram conveying the news. Gandhi steeled himself. “I loved the boy,” he wrote, “I had placed high hopes on him…” The trauma brought the doctor and the Mahatma closer to one another.

Ansari was instrumental in the founding of the Jamia Millia Islamia, and bringing to it a whole host of nationalists, Muslim and Hindu, to learn and to teach. In return for learning Urdu, Gandhi’s youngest son, Devadas, was recruited to teach the Jamia spinning. Ansari was Jamia’s chancellor when he died.

Liberation from mutual animosity and mistrust among Hindus and Muslims was for him a passion. Ansari was, to use an old-fashioned phrase, a man of God. He was also a man of Science. His being a man of science doubtless had something to do with his harbouring his eminently rational goal of wanting Hindus and Muslims to live in civilized amity, not conflict.

As it happened, on the very day Ansari died, Gandhi was meeting in the Nandi Hills, near Mysore, India’s most famous man of science, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. If a man of god can be a man of science, a man of science can be a man of god.

Raman to Gandhi: “The growing discoveries in the science of astronomy and physics seem to me to be further and further revelations of God. (But) Mahatmaji, religions cannot unite. (Only) Science offers the best opportunity for a complete fellowship. All men of science are brothers.”

Gandhi to Raman: “What about the converse? All who are not men of science are not brothers?” ( The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 62, pages 387-9)

Within a few hours of this conversation, M.A. Ansari, man of science and of god, brother to all who came in contact with him personally, professionally or politically, lay dead in his railway coach.

Gandhi had gone to the Nandi Hills with Sardar Patel, among others, for a ‘health’ sojourn at Ansari’s behest. When the news reached him the next day, he was stunned. Penning a tribute for the Associate Press, he described him as “the poor man’s physician if he was also that of the Princes” and said, “His death will be mourned by thousands for whom he was their sole consolation and guide.” He added: “…He was my infallible guide on Hindu-Muslim questions. He and I were just planning an attack on the growing social evils.”

An attack on social evils. Strong words, scorching words. What was the biggest ‘social evil’ that Gandhi was exercised most about in 1936? Hindu-Muslim mistrust.

He needed a guide from among the Muslim community to tackle this. And, with Ansari, that guide was gone. At a loss to find a successor he turned first to Zakir Husain. “I ask, will you take Dr Ansari’s place?” On Zakir Sahib not agreeing, he turned then to Maulana Azad for that crucial assistance. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that had Ansari lived he would have played a defining role as a symbol, spokesman and strategist for Hindu-Muslim unity in the Constituent Assembly and then, very probably, in 1950, become president or vice-president of India. He would have been only 70, the age at which his grand-nephew, Mohammad Hamid Ansari, first became vice-president of India.

What was the main concern – ‘social evil’ – forcefully, passionately expressed in Vice-President Ansari’s farewell address to Rajya Sabha? The challenge to Hindu-Muslim unity, pluralism, not as mere ‘tolerance’ but in Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s words: cultural intimacy.

We know what Vice-President Ansari, descended from that great name in Indian pluralism – Dr M.A. Ansari – who rejected everything that led to Pakistan, has received by way of a ‘reward’.

Seventy five years after the Quit India Movement, 70 years after Independence, we the people of India, brothers and sisters in plural mutuality, must tell the shatterers of India’s unity, Hindu, Muslim and other: Quit, quit terrorizing India.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, online editon / Home> Opinion / by Gopalkrishna Gandhi / August 22nd, 2017