This is my tribute to all the doctors, and medical establishments who opened their doors to me in my 23 years of medical journalism. They gave me their time and let me inside their OPDs, OTs and minds. They shared their knowledge and experiences with me.

I have felt medical science has not received its place in the arts in India as it has everywhere else.

I searched for paintings then statues of our glorious medical past and our legendary healers like Susruta, Charaka and Jivaka or Nagarjuna: there seemed to be none. I found a few good depictions of Dhanwantari only. Most of them were garish calendar art.

This lack of the medical world in Art in India is there down the ages from ancient times to contemporary artists and photographers…. Artists have not entered the hospital or shown the healers. Look at this statue outside a hospital: Hope and Help!

I can fill a ream writing of the unfair negligence and indifference towards the world of medicine….in the world of Arts.

Nobody knows what Susruta looked like and we have learned to accept the depiction in the Pfizer series of the history of Medicine calendar. I yearn to find the handsome Jivaka, Buddha’s doctor, I wish I knew what Charaka looked like, the Kashmiri wandering physician…

Why didn't Ravi Verma, who gave our gods and goddesses a “Face” paint our medical legends : look at the amazing paintings in the Western World on medicine and doctors : be it Rembrandt or Van Gogh or Diego Rivera or Ivo Saliger or Freida Kahlo or Gustav Klimt.

When I did a 3 year TV medical science magazine I was fascinated by the power medical images could have: and not anatomy only : but the surgeons and the viruses, the people who were healing and those who were being healed, figures from the history of medicine and the medical illustrations from the Arabic world too…. And the things that were happening.

These paintings are just visuals that came to me in a dream like period when I was ill myself and was due for surgery. I hope they can fill a micro unit in the hollow that exists in the matter of medicine in art in India.

And this is just a beginning for me…. The subjects, moods and moments that whirl around in my mind regarding medical art can go on forever….

These are my first and I hope you will give me the encouragement to do better and more in the future….