LOURDES PANGILINAN SANTOS

Pediatrician at the Philippine General Hospital who treated every child like her own

Dr. Lourdes Santos had one rule on the Philippine General Hospital children's ward: no child waits alone. Generations of interns learned it the hard way, rounding at dawn to find Doc Lulu already seated on the edge of a crib, talking to a toddler she had not yet examined, a rosary and a stethoscope hanging from the same pocket.

Born in San Pablo, Laguna, to a municipal clerk and a market vendor, she was the first in her family to finish college. She earned her medical degree at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine in 1969, completed her pediatrics residency at PGH and never really left, serving as staff pediatrician and later head of the infectious-disease unit for thirty-six years. She treated the children of vendors and congressmen alike and was known to slip folded pesos into a mother's hand for the jeepney fare home. During the dengue outbreaks and measles seasons she slept on a folding cot in the ward. She taught at the College of Medicine for more than three decades, and her pocket-sized notes on fever, written in a looping hand, circulated among residents like scripture.

Away from the hospital she was a hopeless cook and an enthusiastic eater; her halo-halo parties at Christmas became a Taft Avenue tradition. She sang in the choir of the UP Parish of the Holy Sacrifice for twenty years and kept a shelf of thank-you letters from former patients, some now doctors themselves. She never married and shared a Malate apartment, crowded with books and cats, with her sister Perla. Doc Lulu died on 24 January 2024, aged seventy-nine, after a short illness. She is survived by her sister, her nieces and nephews, and by thousands of children grown old enough to say her name.

“Sit down with the child first. The chart can wait a minute.”