By kerosene lamp, in a room without a water tap, he made the drug that turned India's black fever from a death sentence into a curable illness.
They called it kala-azar — black fever — for the greyish darkening it left on the skin. Spread by sandflies, it swelled the spleen, wasted the body, and, left untreated, killed more than nine of every ten people it took hold of. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it moved in waves through Bengal and the Brahmaputra valley of Assam. The best remedy anyone had, tartar emetic, meant months of toxic injections.
At Calcutta's Campbell Hospital, a physician who had once topped his class in mathematics worked through this problem for years in a small, poorly equipped room. One night around 1920, by the light of a smoky lantern, his experiments with a new antimony compound came out right. He called it urea stibamine. Within a decade, the Governor of Assam credited it with saving three lakh lives in that province alone.
Mathematician, chemist, physician
The lifeline
1873
Born 19 December (by his own later account); grows up in the railway town of Jamalpur, Bihar
1893
Takes honours in mathematics and chemistry at Hooghly College, first in mathematics
1905
Joins Campbell Medical School, Sealdah, as teacher of medicine and first physician
1920–22
Finds urea stibamine and publishes its use against kala-azar
1934
Knighted; two years later presides over the Indian Science Congress
1946
Dies in Calcutta on 6 February, aged 72
By the numbers
The measure of the cure
95%+
Of untreated kala-azar cases that end in death, per the WHO
3 lakh
Lives saved in Assam in ten years, in the estimate of its Governor, Sir John Kerr
6,300→750
Kala-azar deaths in Assam, before and a decade after urea stibamine, from his own chart
6
Nobel Prize nominations in Physiology or Medicine (1929, 1942). He never won.
What he gave medicine
The work
1904
Studies in Haemolysis, his Calcutta University PhD on how red blood cells break down. It added to the MD he had earned in 1902, then a rare distinction.
1911
The riddle of "Burdwan fever": after combing decades of records, he argued that Lower Bengal's epidemic fever was really two diseases, malaria and kala-azar.
1917
Kala-Azar: Its Treatment collected years of trials with sodium antimony tartrate and colloidal antimony, his early attempts to improve on tartar emetic.
1922
Urea stibamine, the urea salt of p-aminophenyl stibonic acid, an organic antimony compound. It worked faster and more safely than the remedies before it.
1922
"Dermal leishmanoid", the skin eruption he described in recovering patients. Today it is called post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis, and eliminating it is still a public-health goal.
1928
A Treatise on Kala-Azar, published in London, became the standard work on the disease. He wrote about 150 papers over his career.
Honoured, then forgotten
Recognition
In his lifetime
Kaisar-i-Hind Gold Medal (1924) and a knighthood (1934)
Nominated for the Nobel Prize once in 1929 and five times in 1942
President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and of the Indian Science Congress (1936)
Medical officials called his drug "eminently safe and reliable"
Today
Almost unknown outside Bengal, and absent from most histories of tropical medicine
Antimony drugs, the kind he made, stayed India's first-line kala-azar treatment for decades
A Kolkata street, once Loudon Street, carries his name
The hospital where he did the work, now NRS Medical College, named a building after him
Campbell Hospital · Sealdah, Calcutta
The little room
In late 1919 a grant from the Indian Research Fund Association let him start the work in earnest. He did it in a small room at Campbell Hospital, next to Sealdah station, on top of a full load of teaching and ward rounds. The laboratory later disappeared, but he never stopped calling the room a place of pilgrimage.
0
Gas points or water taps in the room where he worked for months
~10 pm
The hour, after a full hospital day, when he saw that the results were right
~20 yrs
The time he spent at Campbell, the core of his working life
"I shall never forget that room where Urea Stibamine was discovered … where I had to remain contented with an old kerosene lamp for my work at night."
— Upendranath Brahmachari, recalling the discovery
