Professor Dame Parveen Kumar

Professor Dame Parveen Kumar is a gastroenterologist and co-author of one of the most influential medical textbooks in the world - Kumar & Clark’s Clinical Medicine.

She was born in Lahore (then still in British India) in June 1942, one of three children to Cyril and Grace Kumar. When Parveen was four and her hometown was gripped by violence ahead of the 1947 Partition of the country into India and Pakistan, her mother packed up the family and fled to Delhi, then on to Simla, and later still to China before returning to India.

Parveen was educated at the Lawrence School in Sanawar and then, following her mother’s decision to move to England, at Paddington and Maida Vale High School before she began studying at Barts Medical School. She specialised in gastroenterology, with a particular interest in coeliac disease, and, in 1982, was appointed one of the first women consultants at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

In 1987, Parveen published Kumar & Clark’s Clinical Medicine, co-edited with her supervisor, Mike Clark. She is a former President of the British Medical Association and the Royal Society of Medicine, a founding non-executive director of NICE, former chair of the Medicines Commission UK, and the recipient of many honours including a Dame Grand Cross (GBE).

Parveen is Professor Emerita of Medicine and Education at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. She lives in Epsom, Surrey, and has two daughters with her late husband, David Leaver.

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Producer: Tom Alban and Christine Pawlowsky.

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