At some point in her four decades at the operating table, Pratibha Amin arrived at a formulation that she delivers with the timing of someone who has said it before and means it every time: “A good surgeon deserves good anaesthesia. A bad surgeon needs it.” The line is funny. It is also a precise statement of what she considers her professional identity — not the surgeon’s assistant, but the physiological foundation on which surgery stands or falls.
The Inspector’s Daughter
Pratibha was born in Nagpur. Her father began his career as a school inspector and moved, in time, to teaching at a D.Ed. College — a life shaped by classrooms and examinations. She passed through several schools across Nagpur and its surrounding towns: Corporation School, Gandhinagar, for her early years; Saoner; Government Girls High School, Katol; and finally Hadas High School, Nagpur, where she sat alongside five classmates — Maya Wanjari, Tara Bhat, Sanjay Gadre, Sanjiv Chandorkar, and Rajeev Laul — all of whom would follow her through the gates of GMC Nagpur in 1973. She completed her pre-medical year at Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya, Amravati, and entered GMC with the batch.
Anaesthesiology chose her, or she chose it — the distinction matters less than what she did with it. In 1981, she completed her MD under Dr. (Mrs.) Mankeshwar at GMC Nagpur. She entered private practice the following year, and remained there for more than four decades.
Thirty-One Years at Marwah’s Side
The dominant relationship of Pratibha’s professional life was not with an institution but with a person. From 1982 to 2013 — 31 years — she worked alongside Dr. Vikram Marwah, an orthopaedic surgeon of standing whose influence on her went well beyond the operating theatre.
She described it plainly: “He extended his love and affection towards me for nearly 31 years. In his eyes, I became like a daughter. His genuine and infectious enthusiasm, coupled with his simplicity and unassuming nature, left an indelible mark on me. Dr. Marwah not only imparted medical knowledge but also illuminated the real essence of life through his words and deeds. Under his guidance, I gained the confidence to navigate the myriad complications that arise in operating rooms.”
This is not the language of professional admiration. It is the language of formation — of someone describing the person who taught them what the work actually was.
What Marwah taught her, among other things, was what she had already intuited: that the anaesthesiologist’s task is not passive. “A single error with the surgeon’s knife can abruptly end a patient’s meaningful life. Similarly, a mistake with a syringe of vecuronium can render a patient worse than dead.” Precision and irreversibility — those were the twin facts of her daily work, and she carried them with full attention.
Painless Labour, and the Long Private Practice
In the years of her private practice, Pratibha collaborated with surgeons, gynaecologists, and orthopaedic surgeons across Nagpur. Among her contributions, she pioneered labour analgesia in the city — making pain-free childbirth available to women who might otherwise have delivered without it. She quoted the nineteenth-century obstetrician James Young Simpson’s Scottish successor, James Murdoch Moir, who described the delivery of an infant into the arms of a conscious, pain-free mother as one of the most rewarding moments in medicine. Pratibha made that moment routine for many families in Nagpur.
She also contributed to the Polio project of Matru Seva Sangh from 1982 to 2004 — administering anaesthesia to close to 7,000 patients with polio over those two decades. The number is large enough that it requires a moment to absorb: 7,000 children and adults, each one brought safely through surgery, each one dependent on the steadiness of her hands and her attention.
Until June 2015, she held an associate professorship at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur. She then joined Datta Meghe Medical College, Wanadongri, Nagpur, where she serves as Professor and Head of Anaesthesiology.
Her son Amrut, a software engineer, lives in Canton, Massachusetts, with his wife Siddhi and their daughter Siya. The operating rooms of Nagpur — and the 7,000 polio patients, and the uncounted mothers who delivered without pain — are her other legacy.
“I know my job well,” she said. “To hold a patient together physiologically while the surgeon tries to work his way out of a nasty situation.” After four decades, she still knows it well.