Turning Pages: The Physician’s Dilemma: Privacy or Public Interest?

by TCA Srinivasa Raghavan August 30, 2026

By TCA Srinivasa Raghavan August 30, 2026 0 comments 4 minutes read

Courtesy: Author

Last time I had concluded by saying I would write about books by a much taken-for-granted group in our lives, namely, doctors. A huge dilemma arises for some doctors when their patients are political VIPs. On the one hand are the imperatives of doctor-patient confidentiality. On the other there is the legitimate question whether the people should be told about the physical and mental condition of their leaders. The dilemma has never been resolved.

The first such book I read was in 1983. It was by Lord Moran, who was Winston Churchill’s personal physician. During the Second World War, when Churchill was prime minister of Britain, says Moran, he was very unwell having suffered both a heart attack and a stroke. The book was published in 1966, just two years after Churchill died and led to a huge controversy over whether Moran should have revealed all this. Moran simply said the public had a right to know about the health of their leaders. The book may well be out of print now but I would urge readers to somehow get it and at least flip through it. A good library would have it.

Then there was the book by Li Zishui, Mao’s personal physician for two decades. Li wrote the book in the early 1990s after he had emigrated to the US, revealing what a monster Mao had been and how ill he was towards the end. Li also revealed that Mao never brushed his teeth. Mao, it seems was also given to sex parties with young girls and was quite a pervert. Soon after the book was published there were attempts to rubbish it. It was, obviously, banned in China. And you can’t find it on online platforms. It has vanished like it never existed. I read it long ago. I am sure many libraries still have a copy.

Dr KP Mathur belongs to the same category. Like Lord Moran, he too was a personal physician to a prime minister, in his case, Indira Gandhi. He was more discreet but nevertheless had some interesting stories to tell. She was, it turns out, in excellent health, unlike people like Churchill, Roosevelt, Mao and more recently Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden. Dr Mathur talks about her habits and preferences and tells us that she was in the habit of doodling. He says she once wrote on a Lok Sabha notepad, that she was “sleepy as a bear in winter, eating like a pig and constipated like a cat.”

He has a chapter on her husband, Feroze Gandhi. He says that although they stopped living together in the 1950s because perhaps of his “glad eye,” she never stopped caring. By the way, I should mention that a Frenchman has written a biography of Feroze Gandhi. It’s very worth reading.

Another doctor who treated a lot of VIPs was Dr P Venugopal, Director of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He has a whole section on all the VIPs he dealt with or treated. The list is long and impressive. Abdul Kalam. Narasimha Rao. Atal Behari Vajpayee. Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. Sushma Swaraj. Arun Jaitley. But he confines himself to non-medical interactions. Thus, Kalam was always curious about medical technology. Narasimha Rao was taciturn. Vajpayee was friendly. Indira Gandhi was charming. Shekhawat was addicted to tobacco. Sushma Swaraj was very hands on. And Jaitley had a “razor sharp mind.”

He was also present when Indira Gandhi was brought in after being shot and says that he was guiding the operations as the senior doctor. He provides some very different perspectives and perceptions of what happened on October 31, 1984.

A fifth doctor who had to deal with a lot of VIPs was Dr Sneh Bhargava, a radiologist by training. She was on duty, her first day as it happened, at AIIMS when a prime minister, no less, was brought in with bullets in her body. It was Indira Gandhi. Dr Bhargava describes the chaotic scenes that morning. “Somewhere in the remote periphery of my consciousness,” she writes, “I registered that the gurney did not even have a bed sheet over it.”

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