Two Mumbai doctors will receive Nishan-e-Imtiaz for keeping Jinnah’s illness secret, impacting Pakistan’s creation in 1947.

Two Mumbai doctors will receive Nishan-e-Imtiaz for keeping Jinnah’s illness secret, impacting Pakistan’s creation in 1947.

Pakistan will award the Nishan-e-Imtiaz to two Mumbai Parsi doctors who kept Muhammad Ali Jinnah's illness secret. The decision revives debate over how medical confidentiality intersected with the politics of Partition.

Both doctors, based in Bombay, now Mumbai, examined Jinnah in 1946. According to accounts of the episode, an X-ray showed that his tuberculosis was considerably more advanced than was publicly known, and that he might have had only a year or two left to live. Jinnah had been dealing with the disease since the 1930s, in an era before antibiotic treatment was widely available, and only a small circle of people were aware of how serious it was.

In a post on X, Ahsan Iqbal noted that Dr Patel and Dr Dhaybho-Koo had examined Jinnah's X-ray in 1946 and concluded that his tuberculosis had reached an advanced stage and he had only a year or two to live.

Pakistan News: Jinnah's failing health was one of the closely guarded secrets of the final days before Partition. Now, 78 years later, Pakistan is honouring two Parsi doctors from Mumbai who treated the founder of the country and kept his terminal illness hidden at a pivotal moment in history.