Professor Dame Parveen Kumar

Professor Dame Parveen Kumar is a gastroenterologist and co-author of one of the most influential medical textbooks in the world - Kumar & Clark’s Clinical Medicine.

She was born in Lahore (then still in British India) in June 1942, the middle of three children to Cyril Kumar and his wife Grace. When Parveen was four years old and her hometown was gripped by violence ahead of the 1947 Partition of the country into India and Pakistan, her mother packed up the family and fled to Delhi, then Simla, and later still to China where Parveen’s father was working as an economic adviser. No sooner were they settled in Nanjing than they had to up sticks again as Mao’s Communist forces advanced on the city.

Back in India, Parveen and her brothers became boarders at the Lawrence School, Sanawar, in the foothills of the Himalayas, but after a few happy years there, her mother uprooted her again to move to England (her brothers followed later; her father, who had to give up his job after losing his eyesight some years earlier remained in India). Parveen completed her education at Paddington and Maida Vale High School and began studying at Barts Medical School in 1960.

She specialised in gastroenterology, with a special interest in coeliac disease, and, in 1982, was appointed one of the first women consultants at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. She was the only woman on the gastro team for around two decades.

In 1987, having turned the frustration she felt at the dense textbooks she’d had to plough through as a medical student into a snappier tome, she published Kumar & Clark’s Clinical Medicine (co-edited with her supervisor). Now in its 11th edition, it is still regarded as the standard medical textbook in the UK and around the world. For Parveen, it opened up a second career of international lecturing, teaching and examining.

She is a former President of the British Medical Association and of the Royal Society of Medicine, a founding non-executive director of NICE, former chair of the Medicines Commission UK, and the recipient of many honours including a Dame Grand Cross (GBE).

She is Professor Emerita of Medicine and Education at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry and lives in Epsom, Surrey. She has daughters with her late husband, David Leaver.

Presenter: Lauren Laverne
Producer: Tom Alban and Christine Pawlowsky.

Desert Island Discs has cast away many doctors and medical professionals over the years including Stephen Westaby, Professor Dame Pamela Shaw and David Nott.