Sharad Panday

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sharad Panday

• Sharad Panday was an Indian heart surgeon who was one of the surgeons who carried out the nation’s first heart transplant at the King Edward Memorial Hospital and Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College in Mumbai.

• Sharad’s son Chikki Panday is a businessman and co-founder of a non-profit organization, Akshara Foundation of Arts and Learning, which supports the education of underprivileged children. Along with this, Chikki is also a member of the Steel Consumers Council and the Telephone Advisory Committees of the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of India.

• Sharad Panday returned to India after earning his master’s degree in Canada and was assigned the position of second unit chief at Mumbai’s King Edward Memorial Hospital and Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College (KEM).

• He carried out many open-heart surgeries at KEM in the 1970s and 1980s, which were only beginning to gain popularity then. Panday took surgery training under the Canadian surgeon Wilfred Gordon Bigelow. Inspired by Western healthcare techniques, Sharad adopted all the strategies he learnt during his training and implemented them in India.

• Dr. Sharad Panday performed an unusual heart operation at the Nanavati Max Super Speciality Hospital in Bombay in 1986. This was the first-ever operation performed in India, which involved removing a large tumour from a patient’s left ventricle, due to the difficulty of operating on tumours in that part of the heart.

  

• One of Sharad Panday’s well-known qualities was performing surgeries while wading through knee-deep water. If ever the water supply at the hospital was cut off, Panday would attach a piece of 13 mm (0.5-inch) tubing with the garden tap so that everyone could prepare for surgery. This lead him to develop the Panday shunt, a surgical procedure to replace the mitral valve.

• During his career, Dr. Panday penned several papers in collaboration with other doctors including:
  • Clinical and diagnostic features of pulmonary valve endocarditis in the setting of congenital cardiac malformations, published in the International Journal of Cardiology.
  • Uncommon presentation of choroid plexus papilloma in an infant.
  • Supranational haemangioblastoma without von Hippel–Lindau syndrome in an adult: A rare tumour with a review of the literature.
  • Cerebral intraventricular echinococcosis in lateral occipital extradural hematoma in a child.
  • Spinal intradural extramedullary mature cystic teratoma in an adult: A rare tumour with a review of the literature.
  • High incidence of neural tube defects in the Northern part of India.
  • A Prospective Randomized Study Comparing Non-absorb-able Polypropylene’ Delayed Absorbable Polyglactin 910 Suture Material in Mass Closure of Vertical Laparotomy Wounds and Bilateral Mirror Image Cervical Neurosurgical in an Adult with Neurotransmitters Type 1.
  • Dorsal spinal epidural psammomatous meningioma in an adult male.
  • Acquired dorsal intraspinal epidermoid cyst in an adult female.
  • Supratentorial haemangioblastoma without von Hippel–Lindau syndrome in an adult: A rare tumour with a review of the literature.
  • Open-heart surgery, A study of 100 clinical cases, which covered 180 open-heart surgeries from January 1970 to June 1973.

• On 15 June 1991, Sharad Panday was chosen to serve as the first president of the Indian Association of Cardiovascular-Thoracic Surgeons (IACTS).

• After Sharad Panday’s death in 2004, there was a junction named after him between St. Andrews Road and St Dominic Road in one of the suburbs of Bandra, Mumbai as a tribute to his contributions as a notable surgeon.

• Dr. Sharad Panday met many notable people including Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and Mother Teresa.