The People's Ophthalmologist.

Dr. Perugu Siva Reddy gave his life to a single, quiet promise: that no one should lose their sight to something that could be prevented.

He was born on 12 September 1920 in Dinnedevarapadu, a village in Kurnool District, into a family known simply as Perugu, curd, for the milk they carried to their neighbours' doors. He lost his mother when he was nine. He had watched her live in pain with glaucoma, a quiet thief of sight for which their world then had little answer, and that memory stayed with him. He chose ophthalmology, and above all he chose the blindness that did not have to happen.

That path took him from the village to Madras, where he began his medical studies in 1940, and to his M.S. in Ophthalmology in 1952. At the Sarojini Devi Eye Hospital in Hyderabad he gave the better part of his career to building one of the country's foremost eye hospitals, and in 1964 he helped establish India's first eye bank. But he never believed good care should wait inside city walls. Across his lifetime he carried surgery into the countryside through more than five hundred rural eye camps, long days that began at dawn and reached people who could never have reached a hospital, performing, in all, close to three lakh cataract operations.

His work was recognised at the highest levels, the Padma Shri in 1971, the Padma Bhushan in 1977, and many years as Honorary Surgeon to the President of India, and he wore those honours lightly. He was a founder member of the Asia-Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology in 1961, and worked alongside figures such as A. Edward Maumenee of the Wilmer Eye Institute, with whom the family archive keeps a quiet, smiling photograph.

He is remembered, more than for any of this, as the People's Ophthalmologist, because he knew his patients by name, because the elderly and the poor were never an inconvenience to him, and because he taught generation after generation of surgeons to see their work the same way.