In 1958, Sneh Bhargava was one of India’s first female radiologists. At 95, she is India’s oldest female author

41 years later, Dr. Sneh Bhargava clearly remembers the worst working day of his life. It was his first day to a new job. She had just been appointed director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who is now lifeless a few meters away. In The woman who ran aiimsPublished by Juggernaut Books, Dr. Bhargava, 95, remembers the panic alive at the hospital when they were trying to relaunch the murdered Prime Minister, of which Sari was soaked in his blood. The announcement of his death was to be postponed until the arrival of his family in Delhi, so during the next four hours, the doctors had to keep the charade that they were trying to save Gandhi’s life even if she had been put in death. “Hospital security could not manage the crowd,” she said on Zoom. “They were on the road, on the peaks, on the top of the car, everywhere.”

The selection of Dr. Bhargava as director of AIMS in 1984 had been controversial due to her sex. “Ms. Gandhi had signed my appointment letter, but she still had to be officially confirmed by the AIIMS autonomous director body,” she explains. Without a woman Prime Minister to pass the appointment, the gossip began to spread. Many thought that Dr. Bhargava had lost his luck. But once the national mourning period completed and Rajiv Gandhi took the post of Prime Minister, one of the first files he cleaned was the appointment of Dr. Bhargava, making her the first and the only woman so far to direct the aiims. Not only is that, it is also that the second Indian woman to qualify as radiologist.

Radiology was considered a modest department when Dr. Bhargava began his career in 1958. Until then, the only ways to look inside a patient’s body were to make an radiography or open them. Radiologists were considered, at best, as photographers and, at worst, as a back office workers. CUE: The CT scanner. Not only Dr. Bhargava in the room when his invention was announced in the United States in the early 1970s, but it also convinced the Indian government to bring this technology to India. “There was the CT scan, then ultrasound, MRI and TEP. The body had been overthrown,” she marvels. “Attraction to radiology has increased considerably. He has become the main choice for medicine graduates. Today, I heard that to admission to a radiology course, you must pay 10 crore ₹. Can you believe it? “