People deserve to know how Jayalalithaa died

A few weeks back while the then chief minister of Tamil Nadu, J Jayalalithaa, was in hospital, this column had argued that her health status is not a private matter, and that we need to strike a balance between medical ethics and public interest.

The issue has cropped up once again after her death, with the Opposition parties in Tamil Nadu demanding a white paper on medical treatment extended to her.

The mystery has deepened with some leaked (yet unverified) email exchanges referring to her medical history, suggesting that she was on the wrong medication for her diabetes problem for several years. The state government needs to clear the air on this mystery.

This is not the first time that VIP deaths — not just of politicians but corporate honchos like Steve Jobs — have become a subject of public debate.

In the last column on Jayalalithaa, I had recalled the case of US President Franklin D Roosevelt who died due to uncontrolled high blood pressure in April 1945. His personal physician Admiral Ross Mclntire was quoted in media as saying that the president’s death “came out of clear sky” and that the president had been in “excellent health condition”.

It only emerged later that Roosevelt was suffering from high blood pressure, coupled with other lifestyle factors like smoking and alcohol, for a long time. The president’s cardiologist, Howard G Bruenn, gave a full account of his illness in a medical journal in 1970, where he recalled that Roosevelt was diagnosed with severe hypertension much earlier, but was not given available medication for fear of side effects.

Roosevelt’s case then became a part of medical textbooks.

When Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru died in May 1964, no formal medical bulletin was issued. Newspapers gave different reasons — one quoted doctors saying that Nehru had died of “heart attack and shock”, while another gave the cause of death as “dissecting aneurysm of the aorta”. BBC reported heart attack as the cause.

It was only a day later that news agencies reported an official account that the “the principle cause of death was a haemorrhage of the aorta, the artery leading to the heart”.

This was confirmed in 2008 — 44 years after Nehru’s death — in the biography of Dr Santosh Kumar Sen, a leading surgeon of his time who was in the team of doctors treating Nehru at Teen Murti. Another member of Nehru’s medical team, cardiologist Dr Ramkumar Caroli confirmed Dr Sen’s version when I interviewed him after the revelations named in Sen’s biography.

He told me that Nehru’s ECG was normal on the morning of May 27, 1964, while the abdomen was ballooning due to rupturing of the aorta. Among the doctors attending on the prime minister that day, there was considerable confusion on the course of action to be taken, as per Sen’s biography.

Hopefully, we will not have to wait for decades for doctors who attended on Jayalalithaa to pen their memoirs after their retirement to know about what happened in the intensive care unit of the Apollo Hospitals in the weeks preceding the announcement of her death.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

Also read: Jayalalithaa's questionable legacy with Tamil Nadu's women