Medicine, at its most honest, is less a science than a long conversation — with patients, with colleagues, with institutions, and with one’s own understanding of what it means to care for another person. This site is where I record that conversation.
I am S.P. Kalantri, a physician and teacher at Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram — the hospital that Mahatma Gandhi’s personal physician, Dr Sushila Nayar, founded in the Wardha countryside in 1969, in the belief that medicine’s truest calling lay in serving those who had nothing. I joined MGIMS in the summer of 1982, a young doctor drawn to that same belief, and I have not left. More than four decades later, I head a unit in the Department of Medicine, see patients in the outpatient clinic, the wards, and the ICU, and run a palliative care ward — a quiet, unhurried space where we offer people in the evening of their lives something the ICU cannot: dignity, comfort, and a death that belongs to them. I have lived in Sevagram throughout — with Bhavana, my wife, our son and daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters, three generations under one roof, in a village that has changed less than the medicine practised within it.
Between 2008 and 2022, I served as Medical Superintendent of MGIMS Hospital. I have also spent those decades reading, teaching, and writing — trying to make sense of what I have witnessed.
The essays on this site do not offer conclusions. Medicine rarely permits them. What they attempt, instead, is witness: of patients who arrived with nothing and left having taught me everything; of institutions built on idealism and strained by reality; of colleagues whose quiet competence never made it into any annual report; of the slow, unannounced ways in which a rural teaching hospital shapes the people who pass through it.
The themes range widely — palliative care and the ethics of dying; evidence and its limits; the economics of illness in a country where most people pay out of pocket; the history of MGIMS and of Government Medical College, Nagpur, where I trained; names, numbers, and what the data we collect about ourselves quietly reveals. Occasionally, something outside medicine entirely — an election, a piece of music, a century-old photograph — pulls at a thread that leads back, as it always does, to the ward.
Matter of Fact is written for the medical student in her first clinical year, still startled by what illness does to a person. For the clinician twenty years in, who recognises the cases described. For the MGIMS or GMC alumnus who finds, in these pages, a face or a corridor they once knew. And for the general reader who has sat beside a hospital bed — as patient, as family, as friend — and wondered what the person in the white coat was really thinking.
If you are new here, the Begin Here page offers a few essays to start with. The Archives hold everything written since 2003.
I am glad you found your way to this corner of the web.
— S.P. Kalantri
Sevagram, Maharashtra