Dr Sivasambu Anandaraja- An Appreciation

Here’s to your illustrious  career and innate goodness

Dr. Sivasambu Anandaraja

It’s an honour and privilege to pen this tribute to Ana.  His life was adventurous, interesting and full.

His schooling was at Royal College, Colombo where he was a prefect, managed the Senior Literary Association and was a proud participant in the debating team.

At age 17 he was one of seven Boy Scouts who represented Ceylon at the first World Scout Jamboree in Moisson near Paris. He had vivid memories of this event and the invitation to a garden party at Buckingham Palace that followed, where the scouts had formed a guard of honour for King George the Sixth.

Though born a Hindu, he had no religious affiliations and called himself a free thinker. He was concerned about the downtrodden from a young age and was an elected and active member of the Trotskyite movement in Colombo while a senior in school.

A distinguished alumnus of the Ceylon Medical College, he qualified in 1958. The Ceylon Medical College, founded in 1870 was the second oldest medical school in Asia and entry was by a competitive examination followed by a stiff viva voce. The latter was to assess the appearance, personality and fluency of candidates in English. Ana sailed through it all with ease.

On graduation and completion of internship he accepted an appointment as lecturer in Anatomy at the Colombo Medical Faculty. He soon realized this was not his preferred career path, and armed with a brilliant reference from his consultant during internship Prof. Milroy Paul, who was well acclaimed amongst the medical fraternity in Britain having delivered three Hunterian Orations at the Royal College of Surgeons, left for the UK to obtain an MRCP.  He felt immense gratitude to Prof.Paul for his reference, as he felt it secured him appointments in prestigious hospitals in the UK.

During Ana’s long career as a consultant he kept this in mind whenever he wrote a reference for a junior doctor, and did them in such a manner as to give young doctors the best chance for future success.

In Britain, he worked in the Worthing and Whipps Cross hospitals. He soon acquired membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of Edinburgh (1962) and London (1963) and was made a Fellow of the London College subsequently.  He returned to Ceylon in his Peugeot 403; an epic journey overland with two other friends who also became eminent in their respective spheres, Professor K.N. (Bull) Seneviratne, a renowned physiologist, and Dr. Kirthi De Silva (Kira), physician, who too later migrated to New Zealand.  The slides of this journey shown to us fresh medical students shortly after our entrance to the Medical College by Prof.Seneviratne kept us spellbound and excited our wanderlust.

On his return to Ceylon, Ana initially served as a consultant physician in the Jaffna General hospital (1963~67) and the then Galle General Hospital (1967~68).

We, the medical interns of the year 1967 first met Ana at Galle. We may have been naïve and idealistic but we could sift the grain from the chaff. Ana was the grain. An outstanding physician, who was not only erudite but caring, independent and unbowing.  A common theme that runs through all the tributes paid to him, is that he had a passion for education and was warm, helpful, refined and dignified. His kindness and excellent bedside manner did not discriminate between the poor public and affluent private patients.

He could be formidable. The story goes that when the local Member of Parliament of Galle who was also a powerful Cabinet Minister, once attempted to influence him unduly, Ana stood his ethical ground and refused to oblige. During the heated conversation that ensued, the Minister had said “Doctor cool down, place an ice bag on your head,” and Ana had retorted, “You need a cement bag on your head!”

Being a young man then, Ana developed a close rapport with us junior doctors. We all vied to be in his team owing to his clinical excellence and passion for teaching. In Galle it was that he met his future wife Rohini, “the love of my life” as he wrote of her in later years.

Ana was generous and would be the first to shout a round of drinks, usually the most expensive available. He had carried this tradition wherever he was and his ‘end of rotation’ parties were renowned for good food and the most costly Glenfiddich. Dissatisfied by the prevailing conditions in the land of his birth, he returned to England where he was offered a consultancy, but opted for Aotearoa, ‘the land of the long white cloud’ where he spent the rest of his days. It became his haven and Taranaki his niche.

In the Taranaki District Hospital he was the head of the Department of Medicine and director of the Intensive Care Unit. His fame as a clinician and teacher made him a sought after lecturer at postgraduate local and international seminars. We often met each other at Australian meetings. He would ask pertinent and penetrating questions that illuminated the topic on hand. Colleagues have remarked how he practised state of the art cardiology at Taranaki even before Auckland centres had adopted them.  In spite of his brilliance as a clinician, he was warm, approachable and kind, going out of his way to help the many who sought his assistance.

Retirement was mandatory then at age 65 in New Zealand and he came over to Queensland where he was Director of Medicine at the Gladstone District Hospital from 1998 to 2004, during which time he was also a participant examiner for the FRACP clinical examinations. Once New Zealand rescinded the law on compulsory retirement at 65, Ana returned to New Zealand as a consultant at the Auckland City Hospital and cardiologist at Waitemata Cardiology.

It was not ‘all work and no play’, for Ana was a lover of the arts, eastern and western classical music, enjoyed horse riding and having obtained his pilot’s licence delighted in taking to the skies in a Cessna 172 with his friends and family. The sky was not the limit to his zest for life; colleagues have recalled the days he drove himself to work at the Taranaki District Hospital in his beloved two-toned beige and gold Rolls Royce, to deliver to his patients his Rolls Royce care.

Ana and Rohini have two children, Romesh and Natasha (Anushri) of whom he was exceedingly proud. He was a loving husband and father, and touched the lives of many with his kindness, empathy, generosity and readiness to help, a man we could proudly call our own.

Ana, we salute not only your illustrious career, but also your innate goodness. “To live in the hearts of those we love is never to die.”

May you rest in peace.

Dr. Kumar Gunawardene