T S Kanaka
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A brief biography
[February 4, 2024: The Times of India]
T S Kanaka, neurosurgeon who fought for a place in OT
➤ Instead of a scalpel, she was handed eight cutting words. “I’ll see that you don’t become a surgeon,” said the chief doctor to T S Kanaka on her first day in the surgical ward as a post-graduate student in 1960s Madras.
➤ At a time when women often dropped out of the male-dominated general surgery course due to gatekeepers, Thanjavur Santhanakrishna Kanaka would go on to become India’s, and perhaps Asia’s, first woman neurosurgeon, as well as the first doctor in India to implant an electronic device into the brain.
➤ Born one of eight kids in 1932 Madras, Kanaka was encouraged to pursue engineering by her father. In preparation, she studied mathematics but on passing out of school, quietly obeyed her mother who asked her to opt for medicine instead.
➤ Concern for her epilepsy-stricken brother-in-law would often make teenaged Kanaka bombard neurosurgeon Dr B Ramamurthi with questions about the condition. The doctor, on his part, offered to teach her neurosurgery after she had completed her degree.
➤ Excited by the prospect, she opted for general surgery after graduation. Though the field boasted many women at the time, few endured “...because they (the men who ran the course) would not allow you to practise,” Kanaka said in an interview to a leading daily. “Most women who applied to enter these exams gave up and branched out to other fields. I had to go through the exam many times.”
➤ Refused the chance to perform surgery by the chief fellow during her first time in the ward as a student of general surgery, Kanaka reconciled herself to learning by merely watching until the last three months of her postgraduate studies when he was replaced by a female surgeon.
➤ On her first day at the Government General Hospital (GGH) in Karnataka’s Guntur where she was posted as a surgical assistant upon graduating, Kanaka would meet the antithesis of that chief fellow. Dr A Venugopal would surprise his new assistant by asking her to wash her hands and help him with a major surgery. “I told him I was raw and had not done much during my studies. He told me not to worry and that he would help me,” Kanaka said in an interview.
➤Later, she switched to civil service and straddled the roles of assistant professor of neurosurgery at Madras Medical College and neurosurgeon at the GGH. Dr Ramamurthi would ask her to single-handedly perform surgeries in front of foreign visitors. “I was able to demonstrate that I was not just a showpiece,” she said in an interview.
➤ Stereotaxic surgery — a procedure by which surgeons enter various parts of the brain through a small hole after which tiny lesions can be made to stimulate specific results in patients with movement disorders, psychiatric illnesses and behaviour disorders, those suffering pain, and even for drug addiction — remained Kanaka’s key interest throughout her career. “I was the first neurosurgeon in India to do chronic electrode implantation into the brain,” said Kanaka, who had chosen to remain single in service of her patients.
➤ Upon retirement in 1990, she built the Sri Santhanakrishna Padmavathi Health Care and Research Foundation, a centre named in honour of her parents which offers free medical check-ups for everyone above 30. Drawn to gerontology in her seventies, the neurosurgeon was keen on teaching fellow silvers how to prevent morbidity in old age. In 2018, India’s first woman neurosurgeon breathed her last at age 86. In a posthumous remembrance in 2018, her neurosurgeon niece G Vijaya told a newspaper that her aunt had inspired at least 70 to 80 women in her wake.
