Bengaluru: Minto Hospital turns 125, health minister asks people to turn eye donation into movement

Health Minister K Sudhakar inaugurates 125th anniversary celebrations at Minto Hospital (Express Photo)

Sudhakar further added that about three to four crore people suffer from blindness in the country. “We need to increase the number of people who come forward to donate their eyes. It is a blessing to be able to provide vision to four people even after death,” he said.

The Health Minister also highlighted Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai’s decision to pledge his organs. Sudhakar added that he himself had pledged to donate his eyes last year. “We need to make eye donation a people’s movement,” he said.

The hospital had begun operations on November 9, 1896 as a dispensary named Bangalore Eye Hospital in a small building in Chickpet after which it moved to a lodge in Lalbagh the next year. The hospital was shifted to the present building in Chamarajpet in 1913 after the administrative and in-patient block was constructed during the reign of Nalwadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, the then Maharaja of Mysore.

A 300-bed tertiary ophthalmic hospital now, the hospital which began offering treatment with only nine patients is now visited by over a lakh patients from across Karnataka and neighbouring states, also with the biggest paediatric ophthalmology unit functioning in the state.

Incidentally, the hospital was used as an isolation hospital first in 1898 during the plague outbreak and then from 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The hospital had also actively treated patients diagnosed with mucormycosis (black fungus) during and after recovering from Covid.

“When the pandemic was at its peak, Victoria and Minto hospitals (both affiliated to the Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute) were reserved for Covid treatment. Now, it has been reopened for regular treatment. People can now avail necessary treatment without any hesitation,” Sudhakar said.

He added that about 500 to 800 people use OPD (outpatient department) facilities daily and about 10,000 surgeries are carried out in the hospital every year.