Srinivasa Ramanujan
Illness and death

Ramanujan had numerous health problems throughout his life. His health worsened in England; possibly he was also less resilient due to the difficulty of keeping to the strict dietary requirements of his religion there and because of wartime rationing in 1914–18. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency, and confined to a sanatorium. He attempted suicide in late 1917 or early 1918 by jumping on the tracks of a London underground station. Scotland Yard arrested him for attempting suicide (which was a crime), but released him after Hardy intervened. In 1919, Ramanujan returned to Kumbakonam, Madras Presidency, where he died in 1920 aged 32. After his death, his brother Tirunarayanan compiled Ramanujan's remaining handwritten notes, consisting of formulae on singular moduli, hypergeometric series and continued fractions. In his last days, though in severe pain, "he continued doing his mathematics filling sheet after sheet with numbers", Janaki Ammal recounts.

Ramanujan's widow, Smt. Janaki Ammal, moved to Bombay. In 1931, she returned to Madras and settled in Triplicane, where she supported herself on a pension from Madras University and income from tailoring. In 1950, she adopted a son, W. Narayanan, who eventually became an officer of the State Bank of India and raised a family. In her later years, she was granted a lifetime pension from Ramanujan's former employer, the Madras Port Trust, and pensions from, among others, the Indian National Science Academy and the state governments of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. She continued to cherish Ramanujan's memory, and was active in efforts to increase his public recognition; prominent mathematicians, including George Andrews, Bruce C. Berndt and Béla Bollobás made it a point to visit her while in India. She died at her Triplicane residence in 1994.

A 1994 analysis of Ramanujan's medical records and symptoms by D. A. B. Young concluded that his medical symptoms —including his past relapses, fevers, and hepatic conditions—were much closer to those resulting from hepatic amoebiasis, an illness then widespread in Madras, than tuberculosis. He had two episodes of dysentery before he left India. When not properly treated, amoebic dysentery can lie dormant for years and lead to hepatic amoebiasis, whose diagnosis was not then well established. At the time, if properly diagnosed, amoebiasis was a treatable and often curable disease; British soldiers who contracted it during the First World War were being successfully cured of amoebiasis around the time Ramanujan left England.
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