Meeting Dr Premchand Ratan

TAUREEF MOHAMMED

IN AUGUST 2014, I interviewed Dr Premchand Ratan for our medical students’ magazine, The Pulse. At The Pulse we had just started a feature called “Lifework” in which we recognised the contributions of those who dedicated their lives to medicine in TT. Dr Solaiman Juman, a senior lecturer at UWI’s Faculty of Medical Sciences, recommended that we start with Prof David Picou and Dr Premchand Ratan.

I had never met Dr Ratan before.

I rang him on his landline to arrange the interview. He had a gentle and soft voice. Today, as I listen to the two-hour recording of our interview almost ten years ago, the softness of his voice strikes me, again. How his distressed patients must have felt less distressed just by hearing that voice! “Music that gentlier on the spirit lies/ Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes,” he had recited during our interview. (Reciting these lines from Song of the Lotos-Eaters by the 19th-century English poet Alfred Tennyson was Dr Ratan’s way of explaining myasthenia gravis – a neurological condition that caused muscle weakness and droopy eyelids – to medical students.)

When I arrived at his home at Federation Park, Port-of-Spain, he met me at my car door, led me through the gate, into his simple home. There were shelves of books; there were books on tables; like Dr William Osler, the father of modern medicine, Dr Ratan was a bibliophile.

“As a doctor, you would never be able to see everything in people’s lives, but when you read a novel, you have the privilege of being with others and seeing how they react,” he told me.

Reading broadens one’s imagination, and a doctor, he added, needed to have a broad imagination. A neurologist by training, he said: “If you have a patient with a stroke, you have to imagine what is going on in their life when they go home, and if you can imagine that, then you can think about ways you could help.”

In a 1995 speech to a medical alumni meeting, a copy of which he shared with me, he emphasised the importance of the arts and humanities in medicine: “We must teach them (future doctors) that the pursuit of science is not in conflict with the pursuit of art and humanities, and that if they perceive a conflict, then the two can best be reconciled by being a true doctor.”

He grasped every opportunity to repeat the words of the 19th-century physician writer, Anton Chekhov: “Medicine is my lawful wedded wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.”

On the wards of the Port of Spain General Hospital, Dr Ratan practised what he preached, reciting poetry as he pointed out signs of various diseases. “It wasn’t just showing off poetry, but making teaching enjoyable.” He showed me a thank-you card from a group of students, “What a nice blend of philosophy, medicine and fun. Your wisdom was appreciated and valued,” one student wrote.

For almost 50 years, from 1967 – when clinical bedside teaching was first introduced in Trinidad – to April 2014, Dr Ratan taught students on the wards. At age 86, he decided to hang up his stethoscope. “He stopped because finding a parking spot became too difficult,” his wife, Sybil – may she rest in peace – said, filling in the gaps as Dr Ratan recalled his life journey in their living room.

His dedication to teaching was born out of his deep admiration for his own teachers. You see, when Dr Ratan was eight years old, his father died. The last of six children, he had an uncertain future. When he enrolled at Naparima College in the early 1940s, his future would begin to take shape. There he met former TT president Noor Hassanali, a master at the college at the time. Both men would become lifelong friends, and both men – teacher and student – would be distinguished by and remembered for their humility and kindness.

When the 2014 edition of The Pulse came out, a former student of Dr Ratan’s messaged me: “He was such a beautiful soul.”

Dr Ratan died on March 3.

“There is sweet music here that softer falls/ Than petals from blown roses on the grass,” he recited, birds chirping in the background. “That talks about observation. I would ask the students: when you drive around the Savannah, do you observe the poui flowers on the ground?”

Rest in peace, Dr Ratan.

Taureef Mohammed is a graduate of UWI and a geriatric medicine fellow at Western University, Canada