Remembering S.T. Narasimhan, a Forgotten Pioneer of Indian Neurology

Every medical specialty has its founding generation, the clinicians and researchers who built institutions, trained students, and established standards of practice in eras when the tools of modern neuroscience barely existed. In India, the history of neurology has been shaped by a small number of such figures, and a new historical profile published in the Journal of Neurology turns attention to one of the least remembered among them: S.T. Narasimhan, who lived from 1913 to 1959. Written by Shravan Harish and Nishanth Gowda of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, together with Nikita Balachandar of Kilpauk Medical College in Chennai, the profile appears in the journal’s long-running Pioneers in Neurology series, which exists precisely to rescue such careers from obscurity and to document how the discipline took root outside Europe and North America.

The brevity of Narasimhan’s life, cut short at forty-six, invites reflection on how much of the early history of Indian neurology remains scattered across obituaries, institutional records, and the memories of successive generations of trainees. Historical scholarship in medicine depends on this kind of archival reconstruction, and the authors of the new profile situate their subject within the broader narrative of how neurological practice developed in mid-twentieth-century India, a period when the country had very few dedicated neurologists, no large neurological research infrastructure, and limited access to the diagnostic technologies that were transforming the field elsewhere.

Understanding why profiles like this matter requires some appreciation of what neurology looked like in India during Narasimhan’s working years. Electroencephalography, which records the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp, was still a young technology globally, having been applied to human subjects in the late 1920s and 1930s. Its spread to Indian institutions came slowly, and for most of the period in question, diagnosis rested on meticulous clinical examination: the detailed mapping of weakness, reflexes, sensation, and cranial nerve function that remains the foundation of neurological training today. In that environment, the authority of a neurologist rested on clinical acumen and teaching rather than on laboratory resources, and the reputations of the pioneers were built case by case, ward round by ward round.

The institutional history of Indian neurology provides the backdrop against which the new profile should be read. The Neurological Society of India, the professional body that united the country’s neurologists, neurosurgeons, and allied specialists, was founded in 1951, a milestone that marked the transition from isolated individual practice to an organized specialty with meetings, journals, and shared standards. Madras, now Chennai, emerged as one of the crucial centers of this development. The Madras Institute of Neurology at Madras Medical College, whose history has been documented in earlier reviews, became a training hub that produced generations of neurologists who then spread across the country, establishing departments in medical colleges and teaching hospitals from the south of India to the north.

Chennai’s role in this story is one reason the new profile is notable: one of its co-authors is based at Kilpauk Medical College in that city, and the lineage connecting mid-century Madras neurology to the present-day departments of Tamil Nadu is a living professional inheritance. The historians of Indian neurology who have written on this period, including the authors of a widely cited 2013 review of the field’s historical development, emphasize that the specialty’s growth was driven by a handful of interconnected figures, many of whom trained together, corresponded across institutions, and collectively argued for the resources needed to build dedicated neurological units. Biographical profiles are the raw material of that argument, because they demonstrate concretely what individual physicians contributed in an era of scarcity.

Epilepsy offers a particularly clear example of how the foundations laid by early Indian neurologists grew into a modern subspecialty. Reviews of epilepsy surgery in India describe a trajectory that began with a small number of pioneering centers performing surgical procedures for drug-resistant epilepsy and expanded, over decades, into a network of comprehensive epilepsy programs using video-electroencephalographic monitoring, magnetic resonance imaging, and invasive electrode recordings to localize seizure origins in the brain. Epidemiological analyses of epilepsy surgery in India published in the last decade show both the growth of surgical capacity and the persistent treatment gap, with millions of people with epilepsy in the country lacking access to specialist care. The clinicians of Narasimhan’s generation, working without any of these technologies, established the clinical frameworks for seizure classification and medical management on which that later surgical enterprise depended.

The Pioneers in Neurology series, in which the new profile appears, serves a function that goes beyond commemoration. By publishing short biographical accounts in a major international neurology journal, the series makes the history of the discipline visible to a global readership that may know little about how neurology developed in different parts of the world. This matters for scientific reasons as well as cultural ones. The epidemiology of neurological disease in India differs in important ways from that of high-income countries, including a higher burden of infections affecting the nervous system, distinct patterns of stroke etiology, and genetic variations that influence conditions such as muscular dystrophy and movement disorders. Knowing who built the clinical and research base in India helps explain why certain research questions were prioritized there, and why contemporary Indian neuroscience looks the way it does.

There is also a methodological point worth making about historical profiles of this kind. Because the authors state that no datasets were generated or analyzed in preparing the manuscript, the profile is a work of synthesis, drawing on previously published literature and historical records rather than new data collection. The reference list of the article points to the key secondary sources on Indian neurology’s history, including the 2013 historical perspective in the Annals of the Indian Academy of Neurology, the account of the Madras Institute of Neurology published in Neurology India, the memoir of the celebrated neurosurgeon B. Ramamurthi, and reviews of epilepsy surgery and its epidemiology in India. This citation network shows how the history of a medical specialty is assembled: from autobiographies, institutional histories, society records, and earlier biographical sketches, each source preserving fragments that later historians piece together.

For readers encountering Narasimhan’s name for the first time, the profile is an invitation to think about the contingency of medical history. A physician who dies at forty-six, in 1959, just as organized neurology was taking institutional shape in India, leaves behind an incomplete record, and the survival of his reputation depends on whether later colleagues judge the record worth preserving. The decision by neurologists at NIMHANS, today one of India’s premier neuroscience institutions, to document his career signals a deliberate effort to keep the founding generation in view. NIMHANS itself grew out of the mid-century expansion of mental health and neurosciences in the country, and its faculty writing about a predecessor from the 1940s and 1950s illustrates the continuity between the pioneers and the modern specialty.

The broader lesson of the profile is that the history of neuroscience is global, uneven, and still being written. The technologies that dominate headlines today, from transcranial magnetic stimulation to brain-machine interfaces, rest on generations of clinical work that was often unglamorous, poorly funded, and carried out in conditions very different from those of well-equipped research hospitals. In India, that work was done by a small cohort of physicians who built departments, founded a society, trained students, and treated enormous numbers of patients with limited means. Recovering the individual stories within that cohort, as the Journal of Neurology profile of S.T. Narasimhan does, is how the specialty understands its own origins, and how contemporary researchers and clinicians measure how far the field has traveled in the seven decades since his death.

Subject of Research: Historical profile of early Indian neurologist S.T. Narasimhan (1913–1959) and the development of neurology in India

Article Title: S.T. Narasimhan (1913–1959)

Article References: Harish, S., Gowda, N., & Balachandar, N. (2026). S.T. Narasimhan (1913–1959). Journal of Neurology, 273(11), Article 655. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-026-14197-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00415-026-14197-y

Keywords: S.T. Narasimhan, history of neurology, Indian neurology, Pioneers in Neurology, Journal of Neurology, NIMHANS, Madras Institute of Neurology, Neurological Society of India, epilepsy surgery, electroencephalography, medical history, Chennai