Jack Preger

Jack Preger (born 25 July 1930 in Manchester, England) is a British doctor who has been offering medical treatment as well as vocational training to the poor in the Indian city of Kolkata and in other parts of West Bengal since 1972. He established the relief agency Calcutta Rescue.

Preger graduated from St Edmund Hall, Oxford with a post-graduate degree in economics and political science. He worked for a few years as a farmer in Wales before selling his farm and deciding to become a doctor instead. In 1965, he was admitted into the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin at the age of 35.

In 1972, when he had just finished his internship, although his plans had been to dedicate his life to the poor in South or Central America, and he had prepared himself by learning Spanish, he answered a call over the radio for doctors to help the people of then newly independent Bangladesh. He was soon in Dhaka, where he worked, under squalid conditions, in refugee camps filled with Urdu-speaking people who intended to return to Pakistan. He learnt Urdu and later Bengali. In 1975, he set up a 90-bed clinic in Dhaka and two farms on the outskirts of the city.

However, his work in Dhaka came to an abrupt end when he discovered that Dutch non-government organisation Terre des Hommes was operating a child-smuggling racket, and exposed it despite the Bangladesh government warning him not to. He was deported to Bangkok in 1979.

After being deported from Bangladesh, he went to India the same year and worked in Kolkata for six months under Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. However, Preger criticized the inadequate conditions in Mother Teresa's charities, saying "If one wants to give love, understanding and care, one uses sterile needles. This is probably the richest order in the world. Many of the dying there do not have to be dying in a strictly medical sense."

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