B. N. Jagannath Kamath

Dr. B. N. Jagannath Kamath was an Indian orthopaedic surgeon who specialised in surgery of the hand. A graduate of Kasturba Medical College (KMC), Mangalore, he trained in hand surgery at Government Stanley Hospital, Chennai, in the hand unit founded by R. Venkataswamy, and joined the Department of Orthopaedics at KMC Mangalore as a lecturer in 1989. He was Professor and Head of the department from 2006 until his death in 2023.

Much of his work was on surgical instruments, splints, implants and training models made from inexpensive, readily available materials. Examples include a wire-loop “bone tie” for fixing fractures of the hand, a nerve approximator built from external-fixator parts, and a latex-tube model for practising microvascular repair. He was an author on 96 known publications between 2003 and 2025. Three devices he developed with the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal were granted Indian patents in 2023 and 2024.

He taught orthopaedics at KMC Mangalore for more than three decades and guided postgraduate dissertations in the department. He served on the executive committee of the Indian Society for Surgery of the Hand (ISSH) and was organising chairman of ISSHCON 2014, the society’s 38th annual conference, held in Mangalore. The Dr. B. Jagannath Kamath Memorial Oration at KMC Mangalore and the ISSH’s Prof. B. Jagannath Kamath Ideas & Innovation Award are named in his memory.

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About this website

This website is created and maintained by his family. It brings his publications together in one place and records the devices, patents, dissertations and memorial events connected with his work.