Kolkata: Jack Preger, Kolkata’s ‘Pavement Doctor’ who spent nearly four decades treating the city’s poorest and most vulnerable people, died on Oct 31 in Norfolk, UK, after a brief illness. He was 96.
Born in Manchester in 1930, Preger had once considered becoming a rabbi. At 34, he decided to study medicine and enrolled at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin the following year. But in 1972, responding to a radio appeal, he travelled to newly independent Bangladesh to provide medical care to refugees living in desperate conditions in Dhaka.
He later won a place at Oxford to study economics and political science, becoming the first Jewish student admitted to St Edmund Hall. After qualifying as a doctor, he converted to Catholicism, learnt Spanish and planned to work among the poor in South or Central America. Preger’s years in Kolkata were also marked by repeated legal battles with the authorities who tried to stop him from practising medicine and block overseas donations to Calcutta Rescue. He was imprisoned at one point and contracted amoebic dysentery in jail. Disturbed by the prison conditions he witnessed, he began campaigning for penal reform after his release.