Temulji B. Nariman was born on 3 September 1848 to a poor family at Navsari. He was married to his cousin in 1853 when he was 5 years old, and in 1997 his marriage to Lady Nariman of Bombay of 86 years duration was officially noted as the longest marriage ever recorded and has only been recorded to have been surpassed by two other couples, with the longest being 90 years and 291 days.
Career
In 1872, Temulji passed his medical licentiate at Grant Medical College. Subsequently, he became the first University of Bombay graduate to be elected its medical Dean. In 1887, his interest in puerperal fever led him to co-found the Parsi Lying-in Hospital, one of Bombay's first maternity hospitals which was completed in 1895. It was later popularly known as Temulji's Lying-in Hospital and he came to be symbolic of "Parsi motherhood". Nariman headed the maternity hospital for twenty one years and joined the Governor's council in 1910. In 1902, he prepared an essay describing his time at Grant Medical College. Among the descriptions of the training and examination arrangements there he noted that the college physicians were often in competition with local "quacks" and unqualified medical practitioners known as vaids and hakims who offered traditional remedies and sometimes were able to claim a success when a patient who was already close to recovery was transferred to their care. For his diverse activities, Nariman was awarded the gold Kaisar-i-Hind Medal in 1909. In 1913, Nariman was elected vice president of the newly formed College of Physicians and Surgeons of Bombay and later became its president. He was knighted in 1914 for his work during the plague epidemic in India at the turn of the 19th century. He later became a Fellow of Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1922 by which time he claimed to have attended more than 25,000 maternity cases. He was selected at Sheriff of Bombay for 1922–23. From 1932 to 1938, he was grandmaster of the District Grand Lodge of India, the first grandmaster of All Scottish Freemasonry in India.
Death and legacy
Nariman died in August 1940. A painting of him was unveiled at Grant Medical College in 1925. In 2014, plans were confirmed to rebuild Temulji's Lying-in hospital into an orthopaedic hospital.
