Prafulla Kumar Sen MD (7 December 1915 – 22 July 1982) was an Indian vascular and cardiothoracic surgeon, who led the first human heart transplant procedure in India in 1968 and became the fourth surgeon in the world to carry out this operation. It was also the sixth attempt at this procedure in the world.
He was active in establishing postgraduate programmes in surgical training and one of the early surgeons to perform aortic surgery in India in the 1950s. After being the first in India to perform a closed mitral valvotomy in 1952, within a year he repaired a coarctation of the aorta and by 1956 he had successfully attempted the first direct vision closure of an atrial septal defect. In the 1950s he turned his attention from aortic surgery to open heart surgery following numerous experiments on dogs. He subsequently led teams that performed two heart transplants in Bombay in 1968. Both recipients died on the day of their operation.
Sen was, in addition, a poet and painter. His paintings were displayed once in the United States, and twice in India.
Early life and education
Prafulla Kumar Sen, popularly known as P. K. Sen, was born on 7 December 1915 in Calcutta, British India. He had one sister and his father was a civil servant.
He began his early education at a public school in Jamtada, Bihar, before attending the Victoria College of Sciences, Nagpur. Subsequently, Sen gained admission to medicine at the G.S. Medical College, Bombay, where he studied between 1933 and 1938, before passing his MBBS. In 1940, he achieved a distinction in his master of surgery (MS) degree at the University of Bombay.
Surgical career
Sen's internships and surgical training were completed at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital (KEM), Bombay between 1938 and 1943, after which he returned to G.S. Medical College as assistant honorary surgeon. Initially, he received aid from the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR). He was frequently in dispute with the Bombay Municipal Corporation who were more concerned with providing for diseases of poverty and over population. However, he was ambitious, a "buccaneer" and had a wish to extend Indian medicine into the rapidly growing and exciting arena of open heart surgery. He was inspired by Charaka but also paid tribute to Western medical pioneers including John Hunter and Alexis Carrel.
Pennsylvania
In 1949, following an application for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and the subsequent endorsement by Isidor Schwaner Ravdin, chair of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania at their request, Sen travelled to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States to work for six months with thoracic surgeon James Hardy. Their research on the "impact of surgery on adrenocortical activity" was presented at the American College of Surgeons in Boston in October 1950 and later, amidst the backdrop of racial unrest in the U.S. and an incident in which Sen was nearly barred from a hotel, at the American Physiological Society in Atlanta. Before returning to India in 1952, Sen visited surgical research centres all over the United States including Minneapolis, New York and Baltimore. In addition, he visited London and Sweden. Over the next fifteen years, he obtained another two travel fellowships to the U.S., with assistance from the Rockefeller foundation.
Return to India
In 1952, he was appointed to KEM Hospital as honorary surgeon, but soon left to take up the post of director professor of surgery at G.S. Medical College, the post he held until his retirement in 1973.
He initially worked in experimental and clinical research, but was later active in establishing postgraduate qualifications in cardiothoracic surgery during a period in which he also founded specialist departments at G.S. Medical college and the KEM Hospital, including gastrointestinal and hepatic surgery, sports medicine and oncology.
Early cardiovascular surgery
In addition to North American networks, Rockefeller support and funding, and the ICMR, Sen was also influenced by Soviet surgeons, particularly Vladimir Demikhov. Along with other KEM Hospital cardiothoracic surgeons including M. D. Kelkar, G. B. Parulkar who established the technique of hypothermic circulatory arrest in resection of aortic aneurysm and T. P.Kulkarni who described tuberculous aortitis, Sen was one of the first to perform aortic surgery in the 1950s, laying the foundations at first for aortic surgery and than later open heart surgery in India.