The King of Hearts
Trehan is among India’s top cardiac surgeons, and definitely its most famous. He is the country’s First Doctor, serving the President of India since 1991. He has performed close to 50,000 surgeries, and is the president of the Indian Healthcare Federation. After several years of practice in the US and UK, he returned to India in the eighties to set up and kickstart Escorts Heart Institute and Research Center in New Delhi. For a man who wears scrubs and a mask for most of his day, the 65-year-old is wildly popular in celebrity circles. His encouragement of medical tourism and his much-publicised exit from Escorts has made him a controversial figure, but his philanthropy, and crucial role in raising the standard of healthcare in India is undeniable. Since 2004, he has been building a massive integrated health facility in Gurgaon, a Delhi suburb, on the lines of Mayo Medical School and John Hopkins Hospital. With a budget of Rs. 1250 crore, Medicity, a city for medicine that skeptics have called “sheer madness”, symbolises the nature of Trehan’s vision for medicine: ambitious and global.
