page_title: Nagarur Gopinath
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Nagarur Gopinath / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Central Lawn of AIIMS
context_page_description: Nagarur Gopinath was an Indian surgeon and one of the pioneers of cardiothoracic surgery in India. He is credited with the first successful performance of open heart surgery in India which he performed in 1962. He served as the honorary surgeon to two Presidents of India and was a recipient of the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri in 1974 and Dr. B. C. Roy Award, the highest Indian medical award in 1978 from the Government of India.
context_section_description: Gopinath was born on 13 November 1922 in Bellary, a historic city with many neolithic archaeological sites, in the south Indian state of Karnataka to Sundaramma and Nagarur Narayana Rao. He did his schooling at a local school in Bellary and graduated from the Madras Christian College, Tambaram after which he passed the graduate degree in medicine from the Madras Medical College. His career started in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the British India where he worked with renowned cardiologist, Samuel Oram and surgeon, Leigh Collis at Lahore, Pune and Yangon. After retiring from the Army Corps, Gopinath joined Arogyavaram Medical Centre, then known as Union Mission Tuberculosis Sanatorium at near Madanapalle, in the Andhra Pradesh district of Chittoor and worked there till 1951. In April that year, he moved to Vellore to join the Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMCH) at their cardiology department as a trainee under Reeve Hawkins Betts, who started the department of cardio-vascular thoracic surgery in 1949 at CMC and the founding president of the  Indian Association of Cardiovascular Thoracic Surgeons (IACTS).
  The move to CMCH gave Gopinath the opportunity to interact with some of the noted medical doctors in India such as A. K. Basu, Meherji Mehta and B. L. Gupta. In 1957, he received the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship with which he did advanced training till 1958 under C. Walton Lillehei, an American pioneer of open heart surgery, at the University of Minnesota Hospitals in Minneapolis, USA. With the assistance of R. H. Betts, he passed MS in thoracic surgery from CMCH in their first batch in 1960. He stayed at CMCH till 1964 during which period he set up a research laboratory for open heart surgery programme and conducted over 20 tests on dogs. In April 1964, he moved to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to take up the post of the chief of department of cardiothoracic surgery there. At AIIMS, he, along with the then head of cardiology department, Sujoy B. Joshi, established a combined group of Cardiology and Cardiac surgeons.
  Retiring from the AIIMS in 1982, Gopinath engaged himself with research activities at Seetharam Bhartia Institute Hospital in New Delhi. He died on 3 June 2007 at the age of 85, survived by his wife Rama, daughter Latha, and two sons, Madhu and Ashok.
caption: AIIMS, New Delhi, central lawn
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