Dwarkanath Kotnis practised at a period when medicine itself was being rebuilt on new foundations.
The record lists Dwarkanath Kotnis as Indian physicians dispatched to China to provide medical assistance during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938.
Dwarkanath Kotnis was born at Solapur in 1910. His recorded nationality is India. He trained at University of Mumbai and King Edward Memorial Hospital and Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, laboratory medicine, vaccines and public health began to change mortality at population scale.
Clinical knowledge is accumulated slowly and revised often, usually at some cost.
That the work was done from India matters: hospitals, training and research funding are unevenly distributed, and they decide which questions can be asked.
Dwarkanath Kotnis died in 1942, aged 32. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
