The doctor with a friendly smile and healing touch

She just has to look at a child’s face to say what is wrong. A smile, a friendly pat and the illness is cured.For Dr. K. Manonmani, it is the relationship between the doctor and the patient that matters more than merely dispensing medicines.A name to reckon with in paediatrics in Coimbatore, her intuitive skills and knowledge in the subject have saved many a child’s life and made life worth living for hundreds of parents.

The 82-year-old doctor shares her thoughts on her profession and her life with Anasuya Menon.“Immunisation has taken off well and polio cases have been wiped out completely. Infectious diseases too have been conquered; but a lot of children still are not immunised against Hepatitis A, chicken pox, typhoid, measles and mumps,” she regrets.Superstition still prevails in villages regarding diseases such as chicken pox. Though awareness has improved among the public, a lot more has to be done to motivate people to seek the right treatment at the right time, she observes.With a multitude of corporate hospitals in the city, quality treatment is no longer inaccessible.However, her experienced fingers trace out an imaginary line in the air, while saying “the relationship between the doctor and the patient is missing. It has almost become like business, where the human element is lacking.” “Doctors should be social workers at heart. At a basic level, they must be able to connect with their patients,” she says.

With around 60 years of experience in child care, she maintains a record of all her patients in her unassuming clinic next to her home on T.V.Samy Road.A copy of the record is given to the parents. It has instructions on diet, and tips on good parenting. Even four generations of a family have been her patients.“I am like a member of my patients’ families,” she laughs. She conducts free medical camps in her village often and follows up the cases regularly.In a period when very few women had education, and fewer still travelled outside the country, Dr. Manonmani left the shores of India to carve a niche for herself in the medical profession.She got an opportunity to work in the United States, with the recommendation of a professor who had visited CMC Vellore, where she was working as a registrar after her course.

She extended her stay, moved from Chicago to the Downstate University, New York. During her stay in the U.S., she also specialised in paediatrics and earned a fellowship in haematology.Though her professors and colleagues pressed her to stay on in the U.S. and build her career there, Dr. Manonmani wanted to serve her own country.“You are not in India,” was what my chief at the University of Chicago, in the U.S., told me when I diagnosed a Negro girl of enteric fever way back in the fifties. She had all the features of enteric fever and I merely went by what the Science had taught me,” the doctor says.Dr. Manonmani made history in the university by diagnosing typhoid fever, which was unheard of in the U.S.

“It was a long journey to the U.S. I was on the sea for three weeks. I sailed to Colombo, stopped over at England for a week before I set foot in the U.S., a totally new experience for a girl from a village like Amballur,” she recalls with a smile.“America was a second home to me. But that did not dent my desire to get back to my homeland.”She came back to India in 1958 and decided to set up private practice in Coimbatore.She was also working for the Government Hospital, Coimbatore, as an honorary paediatrician. “It was very difficult to adjust to the situation at the hospital at that time. Even IV sets were unheard of then,” she says.

Paediatricians were a rarity at the time she started practising from a small house on T.V.Samy Road in R.S.Puram. People started going to her from far and wide.She got patients even from Salem, Tiruchy and even Calicut.A dedicated professional, retirement never features on her horizon. “I work even on Sundays.”Her ultimate dream is to form a Children’s Trust, a fund that can help parents who cannot afford treatment for their children.

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