Good Doctor

25 years, 36,000 postcards: How one doctor’s gesture helped India’s rural poor stay healthy

Excerpts of an inspiring story I saw in the Quartz.

While in his teenage years, a poor village boy in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh wanted to join the postal service. 

But a relative supported him financially and sent him to medical school. That changed the life of Araveeti Ramayogaiah, who became a pediatrician, but decades later, his day-to-day practice became inseparable from the postal service.

For almost 25 years, Ramayogaiah wrote and sent postcards to India’s poor, especially women, telling them about ways to prevent—rather than cure—diseases. 

The inexpensive postcard was Ramayogaiah’s solution to private hospitals, which are typically inaccessible and unaffordable for many of India’s poor.

In all, he wrote around 36,000 postcards to patients, acquaintances and strangers—explaining basic habits like boiling water and washing hands, and how to prevent commonplace ailments like diarrhea.

“He often joked that if doctors in India were to go on a strike for 10 to 15 days, the mortality rate during that period would decrease because doctors wouldn’t be writing prescriptions,” she told Quartz. “He would say doctors are creating iatrogenic (caused by treatment) diseases. First they give medicines, that causes side-effects, so more medicines…and that’s a vicious cycle.”

“These were mostly uneducated women. So the postmaster who would be delivering the letter would read them aloud for them,” 

Araveeti Ramayogaiah.

In 2005, during the twilight years of his practice, he moved from Kurnool to Hyderabad. “He had no possessions like a house or a car,” Devi said. “He was way too simple.”

Ramayogaiah retired in 2008, but his postcard campaign didn’t. He actually took writing postcards full time.

The good doctor died in Hyderabad in September this year at the age of 65.

If you want to read the full story: Quartz - Good Doctor