Eminent cleft lip and palate surgeon Hirji S. Adenwalla, fondly called ‘Smile Maker’, passed away at a Coimbatore hospital on Wednesday. He was 90.
Head of the Charles Pinto Cleft Centre at Jubilee Mission Hospital, Thrissur, Dr. Adenwalla had brought a smile on the faces of more than 16,000 children in his six-decade-long career. Under his leadership, the cleft centre became one of India’s leading comprehensive cleft-training centres, which attracts medical students from all over the country.
After his medical education from Bombay, Dr. Adenwalla, who was interested in social service, joined Jubilee Mission Hospital, a small hospital that offered rudimentary treatment, in 1958. At the hospital, he met many children with cleft lip and palate, a facial deformity and speech challenge. Cleft, a gap in the upper lip, is often accompanied by a hole in the roof of the mouth called a cleft palate and is a common birth defect. Though the exact cause of the deformity is not known, it is estimated that one in every 700 children is born with it.
Children born with clefts were often condemned to grow up as social outcasts. Not only the child but the family too were traumatised by the condition. Some schools did not even admit them. After a few years of service at Jubilee Mission, Dr. Adenwalla started focussing on cleft surgery, which he continued until a few months ago, recalled Fr. Francis Alappatt, former director of the hospital.
The more cases he attended, the more patients started coming to the hospital. The nonagenarian surgeon conducted his last surgery in December 2019.
‘Extremely committed’
“He was an ultimate smile maker as he changed the lives of thousands of cleft children. Dr. Adenwalla’s commitment for his service was commendable. Cleft lip treatment was an obsession for him,” Dr. Alapatt recalled.
“Many parents who visited our hospital with cleft children were financially backward. Since it is an expensive treatment that also takes up a long time, many parents were not able to afford it. With the support of the hospital, his friends, and a few organisations, Dr. Adenwalla conducted free surgeries and offered treatment to many children,” he added.
Dr. Adenwalla was a recipient of the Joseph G. McCarthy Award for Cleft Surgery, regarded as the Nobel prize of cleft surgery. A few years ago, CNN produced a documentary on his work.
Dr. Adenwalla was a partner of the Smile Train Project, a U.S.-registered not-for-profit company that concentrated on cleft surgery.
