Dr Samad was a real doctor, with a healing touch. But a retired Railways clerk, a quack, did roaring business right across the street, on Nicholson Road. Many people found him affordable and sympathetic. Though prolonged visits without any results cost a lot, some of his patients would recover miraculously or after they moved to another place didn’t require any further treatment.

The quack, after treating his own son for several months for some ailment that he wouldn’t understand, sought the help of Dr Samad. The latter diagnosed that the child had tuberculosis of the bones. Eventually, the child was admitted in a sanitarium in Murree on his recommendation.

Dr Samad charged two rupees for consultation, at a time when mutton cost that much for a seer. But his patients recovered fast. Every evening, Phajja Mashki would sprinkle water outside his clinic, while Bhayyaji, a cigarette vendor, would arrange flower pots for him. People could tell he had arrived from his sola pith hat that would be displayed in the glass window. Though a bench was placed in the verandah for the patients to sit on and wait, there was hardly more than one patient at a time.

His tidy clinic was portioned into three — his office, an examination room with an elevated stretcher/bed, and a compounder’s dispensing room. He also had EEG and ECG equipment in his clinic. He would gauge the temperature, check the heartbeat with a stethoscope, and advise the visitors to have a hot cup of milk and enjoy deep sleep as therapy. He wouldn’t charge anything for these services.

If ever he happened to diagnose some malady, he’d prescribe a bitter medicine that would expel all the bacteria. He would give some patients a shot in the arm, after his compounder had sanitised the syringe in boiling hot water over a spirit lamp. The medical doctor would break open a vial of water by cutting it with a small saw, insert the liquid into another vial containing newly introduced penicillin, by piercing its rubber cap with the needle, and refill it several times.

If the patient was a minor, the doctor would rub his arm with some spirit poured on a cotton swab, and ask him to look away, at a cookies seller standing outside his clinic; in the meantime, the otherwise frightened, unsuspecting child would get the
injection. If another jab was needed, the child wouldn’t scare, because the doctor’s hand was very gentle.

As a child, I got malarial infection. Dr Samad gave me a medicine which had been ground into powder to be taken with hot milk. It was quinine, the miracle medicine that cured mosquito bites.

It was the bitterest medicine ever discovered by the mankind. Finding it unbearable, I dissolved it in hot milk and attempted to gulp it. It turned out to be so unbearable that my eyebrows started to rotate involuntarily.

Once when I suffered a deep cut, caused by a foul googly while playing cricket, he gave me a shot of penicillin. I collapsed because of its reaction. The doctor immediately gave me another jab (its antidote, I suppose). Next, he splashed water on my face rather rudely, and my sensory motors were restored.

While preparing for my matriculation (the scandalous ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels had not been introduced back then), I asked Dr Samad about the physiology of eyes. In reply, he asked me to come back with two bulls’ eyes, which I bought from a slaughterhouse in Saanda. The doctor dissected one and showed me the iris, cornea, pupil, sclerotic, retina and the optic nerve, and asked me to dissect the other eye. Each of the two optic nerves convey a slightly different angle of the image of the same subject, he told me. Later, when cameras with dual imaging lens were introduced, a three-dimensional effect could be clearly seen in the viewfinder. One-eyed persons have difficulty in ascertaining depth of the field.

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Some of Dr Samad’s patients were critical of him as he wouldn’t disallow them any foods. He only advised them not to take extra fatty, sugary or salty stuff.

He disliked the sliced fruit that would be sold on carts and became a feast for flies. According to him, it was “cholera for sale.” One day, when I visited him with complaints of nausea and other symptoms, he could tell that I had consumed some food item that was being sold uncovered.

To him, his patients weren’t his clients; he would relate with them at a more human level. He was always available on emergency calls. He’d even be willing to visit the patient’s house, at the oddest of hours, and not charge anything. When my brother, Imtiaz, broke his leg while chasing a kite, I went to Dr Samad’s house which was located in a dark alley in Qila Gujjar Singh. As I rang the doorbell, he appeared and asked me if he should be ready to attend an emergency case. When I said, yes, he just picked his signature kit and came along.

His diagnosis was that Imtiaz’s fibula (the calf bone in the lower leg) had a hairline fracture. As he touched the bone, my brother screamed. His emergency kit contained a skin-coloured bandage with thin wooden strips which he wrapped around the patient’s leg and told us to take him to a hospital to be X-rayed and bandaged in plaster cast. Even though we insisted on paying his fee, he refused because it was an emergency case (this idea, I believe, was picked up some 50 years later, by the 1122 emergency service).

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Finding my way through the rubble left by the Orange Train, I try to locate the clinic of Dr Abdus Samad, but there is little left of the good old days. The legendary doctor is no more.

(This dispatch is dedicated to Compounder Raees)

The writer is a painter, a founding member of Lahore Conservation Society and Punjab Artists Association, and a former director of NCA Art Gallery. He can be reached at ajazart@brain.net.pk