Dr Nusserwanji Surveyor’s laboratory research into germs and disease helped identify the bubonic plague of 1896 in Bombay
Vispi S. Khambatta and Dr Shubhada Pandya
In 1907 the respected British Medical Journal carried an editorial "British Medicine in India” wherein Governor-General William Bentinck (1774-1839) was lauded for promoting education on English lines for aspirational upper class Indians. The Journal (May 25, 1907) identified Western medicine as an exemplary "civilizing influence.”
Grant Medical College founded in Bombay in 1845 was explicitly "designed to impart through a scientific (italics added) system the benefits of medical instruction to the natives of Western India,” according to Neelkanth G. Talwalkar’s Men and Memorabilia of Grant Medical College and J. J. Group of Hospitals.
That Western medicine was seeded in hospitable soil and flourishes in today’s India is a success story of the East India Company. Another is the establishment of the Universities (Calcutta, Madras, Bombay) in 1857.
Shirinbai and Dr Nusserwanji Surveyor
Framjee Dinshaw Petit Laboratory
A notable amalgamation of the two initiatives is illustrated in the career of Dr Nusserwanji Fakirji Surveyor (1863-1921), turn-of-the-20thcentury alumnus of Grant Medical College, physician and teacher at J. J. Hospital, a senior functionary of the University of Bombay and a gifted laboratory researcher whose guidance was sought by the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
Surveyor’s life was steeped in academe, as proved by the string of degrees he eventually earned — BSc, MD, MA (in Science), MRCP (Member of the Royal College of Physicians, London), DPH (Doctor of Public Health from Cambridge). His undergraduate education was at St Xavier’s and Elphinstone Colleges. He completed his BSc in 1887 in Natural Sciences (Botany, Zoology, Chemistry) with top marks, and received the Chancellor’s medal at the convocation of 1888.
He joined Grant Medical College in 1887, and was an outstanding student earning a Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery (LM&S) with a first class. He also acquired an MA (in Science, which in those days was taught in the campus of the College) and in 1891 he became an MD (Doctor of Medicine) with a decided partiality for laboratory and microscope.
Surveyor’s first two years (1887 and 1888) as a medical student coincided with the tenure of principal Henry Vandyke Carter, MD (1831-1897), a man who ranks as an outstanding teacher and researcher in the 175-year history of the College. Carter had tracked down by experiments on laboratory animals the germ responsible for "famine fever” which decimated the starving, unwashed, louse-infested, poverty-stricken villagers of Bombay Presidency. The poor flocked to the capital city for food during the Great Famine of 1876-1877 caused by an intense drought resulting in crop failure on the Deccan Plateau. Carter’s other research interests included malaria and a fungus causing a disease known as Madura Foot (a chronic skin infection).
There is no record of special interaction between student Surveyor and teacher Carter, but it is interesting that Surveyor as a mature scientist also researched Madura Foot, malaria and other diseases transmitted by insects.
His bent for laboratory work intensified after graduation as a demonstrator in physiology (the study of functions of the organs of the body) and histology (the appearance of healthy organs viewed through the microscope). Practical demonstrations were held in the then recently constructed Framji Dinshah Petit Laboratory, noted a letter from Surveyor dated London, September 21, 1893. That institution was to become so integral to Surveyor’s career that a brief history is appropriate.
The eponymous Framji Dinshah Petit Laboratory for Scientific Medical Research erected in the College campus was endowed and equipped by the son of the baronet for physiological, pharmacological, pathological, chemical research, etc. The foundation stone was laid by Governor Lord Reay in April 1889; the inauguration was by his successor Lord George Harris in February 1891. The architect was Khan Bahadur Muncherji Cowasji Murzban. The Laboratory was solid proof of the British goal to inculcate in young Indian students the methodology of Western medicine employing observation, experiment and deduction.
Surveyor sailed for England in 1892 and almost immediately acquired MRCP and DPH after which he joined the pathology department of University College, London.
His influential mentors at Grant Medical College cannot be identified with certainty. There can be no speculation, however, about the two Englishmen at University College who were pivotal in channeling his interest formally into laboratory medicine — assistant professor, pathology department, Rubert (sic) Boyce (1863-1911, thus of Surveyor’s age, but died young), and the department head (Sir) Victor Horsley (1857-1916) experimental physiologist and pioneer neurosurgeon. Teaching about germs in disease inspired by the work of the bacteriologists Louis Pasteur of France and Robert Koch of Germany, had yet to take root in India. Even British medical colleges had only just started teaching bacteriology when Surveyor landed in England.
Nusserwanji Fakirji Surveyor Gold Medal instituted at the Grant Medical College
awarded to Dr C. G. Saraiya in the 1930s Photo courtesy: Dr S. K. Pandya
Top: Surveyor’s letter to Sir George Birdwood courtesy: British Library, London;
above: Surveyor’s Notes on his Plague experiments in 1896 at the Wellcome Institute, London
"Original research”
Surveyor’s collaboration with Boyce under Horsley’s approving gaze extended scientific knowledge about the fungus of Madura Foot beyond Carter’s observations. Their conclusions are in line with modern concepts about the disease. Another project with Boyce was on a germ normally resident in the intestines of poultry, which was proven by them to cause a severe disease in a cat fed raw poultry meat. This was Surveyor’s first research in transmission of pathogenic germs between animal forms in the natural world. Both research papers were published by the Royal Society of London.
Had he sat for it, Surveyor would have cleared the entrance examination for the elite Indian Medical Service (IMS) with ease and become eligible for professorships at Grant Medical College. But, as he confessed in a letter to Sir George Birdwood (1832-1917, former professor at Grant Medical College and former rector of the University), he rather hoped to join a proposed "Uncovenanted Medical Service” open to highly qualified Indians, and was willing to serve anywhere in India. Unfortunately the Government of India did not pursue the plan.
Surveyor faced another setback. In late 1888, K. N. Bahadurji, MD from London was specially appointed additional professor of clinical medicine and pharmacology at Grant Medical College for "original research” on Indian medicinal plants funded by the Maharaja of Baroda. He was given space and some facilities at the Petit Laboratory. By 1892 Bahadurji had fallen foul of the authorities who accused him of preoccupation with medical politics (agitating against the privileged position of the British-dominated IMS) and neglecting his duties to concentrate on private practice. Despite Bahadurji’s vigorous self-defense, the professorship was abolished in 1893.
This might well have queered the pitch for Surveyor who was in England in 1893, eager for laboratory research in India, eminently qualified to succeed to the chair and, importantly, having no political leanings. The authorities, however, remained unmoved.
Surveyor returned to Bombay in late 1893, a committed laboratory man. Appointment as honorary physician at J. J. Hospital in early 1894 must have provided some consolation after the earlier frustrations. As a clinician and teacher too, he consistently made a very favorable impression: "Dr Surveyor as usual has been most careful of his patients,” noted the Maharashtra State Archives General Department File 1103, 1901.
In private practice at 145 Queen’s Road he designated himself "Physician, Bacteriologist.”
Fortune smiled once again. Within months of his return from England he was deputed to University College, London for further training in bacteriology, funded by the Dewan of the princely state of Palanpur. Characteristically, Surveyor utilized the visit to polish his skills in pharmacology, organic chemistry and chemical analysis of drugs and returned to Bombay with new equipment for the Petit Laboratory.
In 1907 Surveyor was appointed Grant Medical College’s first professor of bacteriology, a "minor chair” reserved for non-IMS personnel. He continued as honorary physician and was provided funds to investigate subjects of his interest in the Laboratory. His interests were wide indeed. Today they would be in the domain of specialists and sub-specialists.
He studied the chemical composition of an Indian medicinal plant used for dysentery; a disease transmitted through rat bites was treated by him with a drug used for syphilis because the causative organisms were similar; treatment of tuberculosis with a vaccine; vitamin deficiency disease; malaria; at the request of botanist K. R. Kirtikar (IMS) he undertook chemical analysis and identification of poison in the wild variety of suran (elephant’s foot, a root vegetable). Kirtikar published Surveyor’s analysis in The Poisonous Plants of Bombay. Surveyor worked on vaccines of disease-producing bacteria for treating abscesses and hookworm infestation in patients dying in J. J. Hospital. The fungus of Madura Foot remained an enduring interest.
During the First World War several eminent foreign-trained consultants e.g. Jamshedji N. Duggan, Munchersha D. Gilder, Gopalrao V. Deshmukh, Raghavendra Row, gave voluntary service in the War Hospitals set up in Bombay for sepoys severely injured in the Middle East.
Surveyor’s services were utilized to keep Grant Medical College and J. J. Hospital functioning. British IMS teaching staff being away on war duty, he was appointed — of course temporarily — to the "major” professorship of Materia Medica and Pharmacy at the College. For some months in 1920 he was also acting First Physician at J. J. Hospital.
In 1909 Surveyor was a member of the University’s Senate Committee which inspected teaching and research infrastructure at the affiliated Grant Medical College. His colleagues were Dr Dugald Mackichan of Wilson College, the jurist Chimanlal Setalvad and "wrangler” (a student who gains a first class honors in mathematics at Cambridge University) Raghunath Purushottam Paranjpye. Surveyor’s hand in the Committee’s Report can be discerned in the details of the lay-out of lecture theaters and teaching laboratories for physics, chemistry, biology, bacteriology and the research facilities at Petit Laboratory. (In those days the College campus hosted the University’s medical as well as science courses.)
Surveyor was later to be appointed Bombay University’s Dean of Medicine.
Combating the plague
Kalpish Ratna’s engaging "creative non-fiction” Room 000: Narratives of the Bombay Plague (Pan Macmillan India, 2015) established Surveyor as the embodiment of scientific objectivity, thoroughness and investigative skill. Guided by excerpts from the researcher’s handwritten laboratory notes made in September 1896, readers of Room 000 watch his experimental rats sicken and die of a transmissible infection. We share his excitement as he discovers that the germs in the blood and swollen glands of Dr Acacio G. Viegas’ patients and in the rats were identical to those implicated in the Hong Kong plague epidemic of 1894. Surveyor was confident because he had seen the organisms demonstrated to bacteriologists in England in 1894.
It was undoubtedly Surveyor’s finest hour but he was acutely conscious of the responsibility attached to success. He went public in The Times of India of September 26, 1896, eschewing sensationalism, soberly summarizing the experiments and observations at the Petit Laboratory and their implications: "I am not an alarmist — had I had (sic) the slightest doubt about the nature of the disease I would have refrained from giving an opinion on the subject most willingly. The disease is so typical in all its clinical aspects and also its bacteriological results that I thought it was my duty to give my opinion fearlessly.”
In late 1896 Waldmar Haffkine, at that time engaged in anti-cholera vaccination in Bengal under the aegis of the Government of India, was ordered to Bombay to prepare a preventive serum for plague. Overworked, short of help and time, Haffkine proposed to the authorities "that the services of an assistant be secured by the (Bombay Municipal) Corporation and placed at my disposal at the Grant Medical College … and (I) recommend for the purpose Dr N. F. Surveyor, who expressed his desire to be appointed to the post, and who is well qualified for that,” noted The Times of India dated January 7, 1897.
Haffkine finalized his plague prophylactic in less than three months. As was his wont — he had done this with cholera too — he demonstrated on himself that an injection of the vaccine containing products of dead plague bacteria caused him no harm. "Surveyor’s was the hand that administered the injection to Haffkine,” noted R. Nathan in The Plague in India, 1896, 1897.
Haffkine and Surveyor were also appointed on a five-member Plague Research Committee, tasked with elucidating all aspects of the disease. Surveyor’s brief was plague in rodents and fowl (he had noticed several pigeon deaths from plague), and the effect of antiseptics on the germ. Haffkine’s remit was very wide — the microbe itself; the process by which it infected humans and animals; preventive and curative inoculation; other treatment.
The Plague Research Committee was ill-fated. Its president, Richard Manser (senior physician at J. J. Hospital), and his attending nurse succumbed to plague pneumonia, the deadliest form of the disease, within hours of each other in January 1897. Surveyor himself was unable to make any meaningful contribution "owing to (unspecified) illness” which laid him low for over a year, noted The Bombay Plague, Being a History of the Progress of Plague in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 to June 1899. Thus was a promising future in plague research aborted.
Surveyor was not called as a witness by the Indian Plague Commission sent out from England in 1899. It is through Viegas’ testimony before the Commission that posterity learns of the useful part played by Dr Cowasji Pestonji Doctor in recruiting his bacteriologist nephew Surveyor for the crucial diagnostic experiments.
Diseased rats vs poverty
In 1897 Surveyor, Drs Bahadurji, Sir Temulji Nariman, Sir Bhalchandra Bhatwadekar, Viegas and other medical notables jointly penned a "memorandum” to the authorities that bubonic plague was only "slightly infectious or contagious” (i.e. it was not readily transmitted by contact). "Local conditions,” they said, were responsible for its spread, and advocated "removal of the inmates from those houses in which a case of the disease occurs,” states the "Memorandum on the Plague by Medical Practitioner of Bombay,” Indian Medical Gazette.
Not a word about diseased rats! The poor and their habitations were implied to be the culprits, not the victims. Arguably such a mind-set personified by Plague Commissioner Rand led to his assassination in Poona later that year.
Surveyor discontinued his association with the Petit Laboratory in October 1920. Possibly he was not in good health for he passed away due to chronic heart and lung disease on January 19, 1921.
His death was deeply mourned by colleagues, students and patients. The flood of condolence messages overwhelmed and touched his family deeply, noted The Times of India of February 18, 1921. Bombay Governor George Lloyd, scheduled to inaugurate the Grant Medical College Gymkhana Pavilion (funded by N. J. Wadia Charity through the influence of Surveyor’s good friend Nariman), postponed the function out of respect. The ceremony took place a month later. The Gymkhana still occupies its original spot at Kennedy Sea Face (Marine Drive).
A reserved family man
Nusserwanji’s father, Fakirji was a surveyor by profession and his profession became the family surname. Nusserwanji had only one sibling, a sister, Jaiji. She had four children, one of whom was Dr F. M. Daruwala (MBBS, BHy).
Doctor, (GGMC), Nusserwanji’s kaka (father’s brother), too adopted his professional title as his surname. He practiced as a gynecologist at Nariman’s Parsi Lying-In Hospital near Flora Fountain. He was also a physician at the Bombay Native Dispensary at Karelwadi, Dhobi Talao. He and his wife, Jerbai, are referred to in Kalpish Ratna’s Room 000. They had several children, one of whom was Shirinbai Doctor who married Nusserwanji, passed away in the early 1930s.
Dadabhoy Pestonji Master, who also adopted his professional title as his surname, started the Young Ladies High School in Bombay’s Fort area.
Shirinbai, born in Bombay in 1873, completed her Matriculation and studied at the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art. She and Nusserwanji married the year after he returned from Britain. They resided at Boga House, Queen’s Road, Marine Lines. They had no children and adopted a niece, Aloo, author Vispi Khambatta’s masi (mother’s sister). This adoption was not recognized by the orthodox Parsis. Aloo married Khudabux, a nephew of Nusserwanji and adopted the surname Surveyor. Their son — an only child — passed away in 1963.
Around January 1, 1921 the Surveyors moved from Queen’s Road to Belle Ville at August Kranti Marg where the Cumballa Hill Hospital now stands. Soon after, Surveyor contracted pneumonia involving both lungs, which he himself pronounced as fatal. He was treated by Dr Kaikhushru Sahiar, but did not survive.
Despite his professional brilliance Surveyor was a very modest and reserved family man who occupied himself with research activities, even doing dissection on rabbits and white mice at his residence in addition to consultation as a physician. As a prominent citizen of Bombay he and his wife were invited to levees at Government House, but he was no Page 3 person, being strictly a family man of upright and dignified character.
In Memoriam
"The Nusserwanji Fakirji Surveyor Gold Medal Fund,” endowed by his widow, was to be awarded by the University to a student of the Grant Medical College who passed all exams at the first attempt and stood first at the final MBBS examination. It is still active, though in view of the current price of gold the awardee has to be content with just the citation, as per a personal communication from 1999 recipient Dr Anirban Bose.
Postscript
Three buildings with a Surveyor connection still stand in the history-studded compound of the Grant Medical College and Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy Hospital: his alma mater which dates from 1845, is now a shell classified as a Grade 2B Heritage Building; the Bacteriology Department which in Surveyor’s time as professor was located in the erstwhile "Leper Ward” built in 1866 by Rustomjee Jamsetjee is now the men’s common room; and the all-important Petit Laboratory where Bahadurji, Surveyor, and, for a brief period, Haffkine, carried out research, currently houses the Central Blood Bank. The Laboratory’s name, originally inscribed in Gothic letters over the porch fronting the then Parel Road (now Sir J. J. Road), has been mindlessly painted over, but can be faintly discerned from the J. J. Flyover.
Interested in medicine related history, Dr Shubhada Pandya did her doctorate on the history of leprosy in 19th century Bombay. She worked as neurophysiologist under Drs Noshir Antia and Darab Dastur at the Grant Medical College.
Vispi Khambatta is the grand nephew of Dr Nusserwanji Surveyor. The 77-year-old retired as a senior executive from the Tata Power Company Limited.