Little Dr Doshi does make a big name for India in Britain

new delhi — The world is growing younger. These are days when babies become bosses, and teenagers turn out to be tycoons. In the medical world, too, boys and girls are graduating as doctors before they barely cross their 20s.

The latest to join the medical boy brigade is Arpan Doshi, based now in England. Doshi is of Indian origin, whose parents hail from Gujarat. Doshi is set to become the UK’s youngest physician to start work at a hospital in northeast England, reports PTI. His first patient is likely to be a little apprehensive that a doctor this young may not be the right thing for her old heart, the organ Doshi wants to specialise in.

Doshi graduated with his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degree from the University of Sheffield last Monday. He was 21 years and 335 days old. He will join as junior doctor in York in North East England in August.

“I didn’t realise I was the youngest person to qualify until a friend checked on the internet. I’m yet to tell my parents that, but I know they will be very proud.”

Doshi’s education was not all in England. Till 13, he was going to a local school in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Around this time his father, a mechanical engineer, secured a high profile job in an international firm, and the family relocated to France.

One would assume the change of place and culture would put any youngster in a stressful situation in terms of adjusting to a new environment, though Doshi was studying in an English medium international school. Doshi took to his studies like fish to water.

Later, Doshi says, he knew most of what was being taught already; so he skipped a year eventually and began applying for medical entrance examinations on his own, having just turned 17.

One university rejected him for no clear reason. Perhaps they thought the student was too young to be true. Three universities offered him admission. Among the three was the University of Sheffield, which offered him a scholarship worth £13,000. Doshi opted for Sheffield. He supplemented his income taking on part time jobs, and for a while acted also as the lunch supervisor at his college.

And now he is all set to work on patients.

A few years ago, another Indian, based in New York, Balamurali Ambati, had graduated from Baltimore City College and graduated from New York University at the age of 13. His parents had claimed then that Ambati was so bright he was doing calculus for fun at the age of four. Ambati graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine with distinction scoring above 99 per cent in his National Medical Boards. His age then was 17. This was in 1995. He is now a highly respected surgeon in ophthalmology. At the time, Ambati was compared to Doogie Howser, the teenage fictional doctor of a popular TV serial.

Doshi wants to become a heart surgeon. “But it is a very competitive field,” he says. Doshi said he had always wanted to become a doctor, and that he was not surprised by the turn of events.

In England, Doshi beat the record of Rachael Faye Hill. Hill had received her medical degree from Manchester University when she was 21 and 352 days in 2010. It is not unlikely that in the near future someone might beat Doshi’s record too by an hour or two. Doshi will join York Teaching Hospital in August.

Doshi has not forgotten that he is still an Indian at heart. He speaks, Gujarati and Hindi fluently. If some of his patients are Indians — and this is most likely — Doshi would perhaps be a little more reassuring than an English speaking doctor as he muttered consoling words in Hindi while cutting open a heart.