Dr Jack Preger

Jack Preger was born in Manchester, England, on 25 July 1930. His family had East European Jewish roots; his father's family came from eastern Poland and settled in Manchester in 1870, where his father ran a grocery business. As a young man Preger considered becoming a rabbi. He completed National Service in the British Army before going to university.

Preger read philosophy, politics and economics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and is reported to have been the first Jewish student admitted to the college. Years later, after a period farming in Wales, he decided at the age of 34 to study medicine and in 1965 enrolled as a mature student at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin. He completed his internship in 1972, at about 42.

In 1972 Preger answered a radio appeal for doctors in newly independent Bangladesh and worked in Dhaka refugee camps, setting up a 90 bed clinic and two farms in 1975. He was deported in 1979 after exposing a child trafficking racket.

He moved to Calcutta (Kolkata), worked briefly with the Missionaries of Charity, then began treating destitute people on the streets. From 1979 to 1993 he ran a free pavement clinic on Middleton Row, off Park Street, six days a week, at times seeing several hundred patients a day, and also opened a clinic at Nimtala Ghat. The work became Calcutta Rescue, formally registered in 1991, which grew into a network of clinics, schools and vocational centres employing local doctors, health workers and teachers. He fought repeated legal battles over his visa and over foreign donations, and spent time in Alipore Jail. He retired in January 2019, aged 88.

Preger was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism after qualifying as a doctor, though Calcutta Rescue was always a secular organisation. He learned Spanish, Urdu and Bengali, and colleagues remembered him speaking to the charity's schoolchildren in Bengali. He was known for avoiding publicity. After leaving India in 2019 he lived in Diss, Norfolk. Details of any spouse or children have not been made public.

Preger believed the poor deserved the same standard of medicine as anyone else, and he criticised care that relied on devotion rather than sound practice, famously saying that if one wants to give love, understanding and care, one uses sterile needles. Colleagues said he treated every patient as equal regardless of caste or religion, and that he saw individual health as inseparable from clean water, sanitation, housing, nutrition and education. After his own imprisonment he campaigned for penal reform.

Calcutta Rescue is estimated to have treated around half a million people. Preger's pavement clinic inspired Dr Jim Withers, who began street medicine in Pittsburgh after meeting him in 1993 and later founded the Street Medicine Institute; street medicine programmes now operate in many cities worldwide. Support foundations bearing the Calcutta Rescue name were set up in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Norway, Canada and the United States, and the work he began continues in Kolkata.

Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), 1993, for his continued perseverance and selflessness. Philanthropist of the Year, The Asian Awards, London, 5 May 2017. The Telegraph Education Foundation Hall of Fame, The Telegraph School Awards for Excellence, Kolkata, August 2018.

Preger's life was the subject of the French language documentary Docteur Jack, which opened in French cinemas in November 2017. He also featured in Calcutta Rescue's own films, in AP archive news footage of his threatened street clinic, and in interviews with Media India Group and The Asian Awards.

Preger's whistleblowing on child trafficking led to his deportation from Bangladesh in 1979. In India the West Bengal Foreigners' Registration Office repeatedly challenged his status, charging him in 1981 with entering without a missionary visa; the charge was dropped in 1989 after Sir Edmund Hillary intervened. Authorities also tried to block overseas donations to Calcutta Rescue until the courts ruled in his favour, and in 1999 he was told to leave India within seven days before the Calcutta High Court intervened. He also publicly criticised conditions in Mother Teresa's homes.

Jack Preger died on 31 October 2026 at his home in Diss, Norfolk, England, after a brief illness. He was 96. Calcutta Rescue and its international support groups announced his death on 1 November 2026. The cause of death was not made public.