By Valmiki Faleiro
valmi...@gmail.com
The Covid-19 pandemic, the frantic search for a
vaccine, and the current discussion of
distinguished Goan doctors on online Goa-centric
fora like Goanet and the Goa-Research- Net bring to
mind another great Goan epidemiologist of the first
half of the 20th century: Dr Jose Luis Pinto do
Rosario, 1883-1935.
Dr Pinto do Rosario from Porvorim-Bardez, Goa, took his
medical and public health degrees in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
He joined the Bombay Presidency's Public Health Service in
1920 and served as Deputy Sanitary Commissioner in Sind and
as Assistant Director of Public Health, Karachi, in 1921
(both now in Pakistan). He served in all the divisions of
the presidency in that capacity.
In 1926, he was appointed Director of the Vaccine
Institute, Belgaum (then in the Bombay Presidency,
now Belgavi in Karnataka), where he made a name for
himself both as a scientist and administrator. In
the early 1930s, he officiated as Director of
Public Health in Poona (now Pune). He was awarded
the Kaiser-i-Hind medal (Class II) in 1931.
Dr Pinto do Rosario was a scion of the well-known 'Pinto do
Rosario' family of Porvorim. Another, Dr Antonio Pinto do
Rosario, founded the famous Maternity hospital, the first
such in Bardez, now run by son Dr Sidney Pinto do Rosario,
whose sister, Fatima de Sa, is an educationist and
entrepreneur, and once an elected legislator in Goa.
Dr Jose Luis Pinto do Rosario was described in the
print media of the time as "very competent, active
and zealous" as a forefront fighter of plagues and
epidemics -- viral epidemics and cholera broke out
frequently at the time -- in west India. He never
stopped until the plague or epidemic was
extinguished, entirely. At any given time, he had
a million vaccines ready to be despatched to any
part of India, even abroad.
Dr Pinto do Rosario twice represented the Bombay Presidency
government in sanitation conferences held in Great Britain
and both times visited the leading medical and sanitation
institutions of Western Europe. Fame had raced ahead of him.
He was lauded wherever he went.
Dr Pinto do Rosario was director of Government Vaccine
Institute in Belgaum, where he suddenly and prematurely
succumbed to a massive heart attack, at a rather premature
age of 52. His obit was penned by the Englishman, Mr.
Macrae, special correspondent of The Times of India in Poona,
who had met Dr Pinto do Rosario and learnt of his splendid
work when attending a 'durbar' of Patels convened by the
Right Hon'ble Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes and Lady Sykes in
Belgaum in September 1933.
Mr Macrae praised Dr Pinto do Rosario's scientific and
administrative work in the course of his 15-year tenure as
Deputy Director of Public Health of the Bombay Presidency
(which included Sind and Karachi at the time) and later as
acting Director of Public Health in Poona.
Dr Pinto do Rosario's senior, Major (Dr) Histerlow
of the Indian Medical Service, director of Public
Health in Bombay Presidency, lamented: "With the
death of Dr Pinto, this branch of medical services
has lost a skilled and active official, and the
presidency a worthy citizen, and I know not how
this void will be filled."
A little before his death, Dr Pinto do Rosario was entrusted
an additional charge of Deputy Director of Public Health, South
Division, during the leave vacancy of the incumbent. Just
then, there was an outbreak of cholera in some parts of the
South Division. Despite being indisposed himself, Dr Pinto
do Rosario immediately travelled 600 miles over 36 hours by
road, and having barely taken some rest, travelled another
300 miles to Sirsi in North Kanara district of the then
Mysore State.
Dr Pinto do Rosario was not just an expert epidemiologist,
but an endearing persona who facilely gained great
popularity as became evident on his demise. Not just among
his subordinates, but the high and mighty of the Bombay
Presidency, not to speak of admirers, friends and relatives
from Bombay, Poona and Goa -- whose insistence on attending
the funeral postponed it by a day. Among the innumerable who
condoled was the Archbishop of Bombay.
A Goa newspaper reported that it was a funeral the likes of
which was never before witnessed in Belgaum. Led by the
representative of the Bombay Presidency government, the
Commissioner of South India, the District Collector of
Belgaum, the area military commander, the Military Chaplain,
American Protestant missionaries, Superintendent Engineer of
Public Works, Civil Surgeon, Dy. Director of Public Health
(south division), Director of Public Health Laboratory in
Poona, Superintendent of Police and the director of jails,
thousands -- Catholics, Hindus, Muslims and Parsis -- turned
out and lined the roads to bid Dr Pinto do Rosario a tearful
adieu. Through his vaccines and his hard work, he had saved
millions of lives from viral epidemic and cholera, both
within and outside India.
Canossian nuns draped the coffin in black and white
and adorned it with flowers plucked from the
sprawling gardens around his official residence in
Belgaum. His funeral cortege, of cars and buses
almost a mile long, crawled two miles to St.
Anthony's Chapel, where the Vicar General of
Belgaum celebrated a Requiem Mass, and thereafter a
few more miles to the European cemetery.
He was laid to rest in a grave alongside his angelic young
son, Gastão, who had died 27 June 1931.
Dr Pinto do Rosario and wife had seven children. A nephew
was Home Secretary to the Bombay Presidency government.
Three of his sons joined the defence services of India as
Commissioned Officers, each in the Army, the Navy and the Air
Force. Capt Norman Pinto do Rosario was with the Army Dental
Corps and later was Dental Surgeon to the President of India
and Dental Advisor to the Government of India. Rear Adm.
DRF Pinto (Faust Pinto do Rosario) was a Surgeon R/Adm, the
first Goan to rise to the rank of Admiral.
The third brother was Air Vice Marshal Erlich
Wilmot Pinto, PVSM, M-in-D, India's first Air
Adviser in London, and best known of the three in
Goa. As AOC-in-C of the then unified Operational
Command of the IAF, tasked with air operations
throughout India, he directed the air ops during
Op. Vijay-1961 that freed Goa from the colonial
yoke. The road from Dabolim airport to Chicalim
junction is named after him.
His PVSM Citation, in part, said, "During the ops in Goa ...
the risk of casualties to the civil population in air ops was
inherent. As a result of meticulous planning by Air V/Mshl
Pinto and efficient coordination, the air ops in the three
enclaves were carried out most successfully."
An exceptionally brilliant officer of the right
age, Air V/Mshl EW Pinto was in a surefire line of
succession as India's air force chief, when he
unfortunately died -- together with top brass army
commanders like Lt Gen Daulat Singh, Lt Gen Bikram
Singh and Lt Gen Rustom Nanavati -- in a helicopter
crash in Jammu & Kashmir in 1963.
A daughter of Dr Pinto do Rosario, Marie Louise, married
Brig Noel Edwin Barretto.
Brig Barretto is one of the famous four 'Barretto Brothers'
-- sons of Mahatma Gandhi's personal dentist at the Wardha
Ashram, Dr Cristovam Filipe Eusebio Francisco Jose Ubaldino
da Gama Barretto, 1889-1972, a native of Raia-Salcete but
settled and practising in Nagpur.
The famous four are: Brig Terence Barretto, the youngest
Brigadier until then in the history of the Indian Army who
was due to be the first Indian Chief of the Corps of Signals
but quit when he was bypassed and plunged fulltime into
helping Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Nagpur,
his younger brother Wing Commander Cecil Barretto, VSM,
initially with the Army Dental Corps but later seconded to
the Indian Air Force, Brig Noel Edwin Barretto an air defence
gunner with the Regiment of Artillery, and Lt Gen Christopher
Anthony Barretto, PVSM, AVSM, better known as 'Gen Bobby
Barretto' who was with the Corps of Engineers having risen
from the Madras Engineer Group.
Do similarities -- nay, a pattern -- emerge? The
two families, Pinto do Rosario and Barretto,
reflect the disproportionate to population Goan
contribution to the world of medicine and the armed
forces of the nation.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Writer-author Valmiki Faleiro is a former
journalist who worked, out of Goa, for local and national
mastheads in the 1970s and 1980s. One of Goa's homegrown
prolific writers, Faleiro's writings found in the Current,
The Navhind Times, The West CoastT Times, and other
publications still offer insights into the Goa of the 1970s
and thereabouts.
Part of the information here has been excerpted from his
well-received and now out-of-print book *Patriotism In
Action: Goans in India's Defence Services*, Goa,1556, 2010
(ISBN: 978-93-80739-06-9)
Goanet Reader is compiled and edited by Frederick Noronha.
- *"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a
violent psychopath who knows where you live." - Rick Osborne*
