About this stamp
From Wartime Hospital to Delhi’s Largest
India Post issued two ₹5 stamps, printed together as a pair, on 27 April 2018 on Safdarjung Hospital, New Delhi. The hospital began in 1942, in the Second World War, as the US Army’s 100th Station Hospital, built in barracks beside the Willingdon airfield to treat American soldiers from the China-Burma-India theatre. After the war and independence, the Government of India opened it to the public with 204 beds and named it after Safdarjung, Nawab of Awadh.
The Hospital Today
Spread over 47 acres in the heart of Delhi, it is, according to India Post, the country’s largest public hospital: on most days it sees about 1,400 emergencies and 8,000–9,000 outpatients, more than 75 babies are born there, and its 40 operating theatres work round the clock. Its doctors set up the first public sleep laboratory, North India’s first micro-vascular surgery centre and sports injury centre, and Delhi’s first limb replants. It has taught students of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, University College of Medical Sciences and, since 2002, Vardhman Mahavir Medical College.
On the Stamps
Each stamp shows the hospital’s modern buildings with a historical photograph behind: medical staff on one, an operating team on the other. They were designed by Anuj and Ashoo Sharma from photographs of the US Army Signal Corps held by the US National Archives, with the cancellation by Nenu Gupta; 603,500 of each were printed by wet offset at the Security Printing Press, Hyderabad.
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