Professor & Head of Pathology \u00b7 Founding Faculty \u00b7 The Man Who Built a Department with Determination and Sweat<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One Sunday morning, Dr. Satish Sharma received his weekly assignment: travel to GMC Nagpur, collect pathology specimens and slides from Mrs. Shobha Grover, and bring them back to Sevagram. The specimens came packed in two heavy cotton sacks, their seams straining under the weight of preserved tissues and glass slides. When no transport was available from Wardha East station, Sharma would sling the sacks over his shoulders and walk back through the dry dust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is how Dr. Ramvishal Agrawal built a pathology department. Specimen by specimen, Sunday by Sunday, carried on a postgraduate student’s back from Nagpur because Sevagram’s cupboards were bare and its shelves needed filling. He was building something in a place that had nothing to build with except determination and sweat \u2014 and he made determination and sweat sufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ramvishal Agrawal was born on March 15, 1934, in Raipur, and completed his schooling and premedical studies there before joining Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1952. He earned his MBBS in 1957 and completed his MD in Pathology and Bacteriology in 1963, trained under Dr. J.B. Srivastava \u2014 who would later become India’s Director General of Health Services \u2014 and worked alongside Dr. B.K. Aikat at PGIMER Chandigarh, Dr. K.D. Sharma at Haffkine Institute, and Dr. Shobha Grover in ICMR’s cytopathology programme. He also led forensic medicine services, developing postmortem and autopsy protocols that sharpened a diagnostic precision he would later carry into a teaching role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In December 1970, he arrived in Sevagram to establish the Department of Pathology at MGIMS. His wife Dr. Padma Agrawal joined as Reader in Anatomy the same day. They came from GMC Nagpur, deputed by the Government of Maharashtra, stepping into an institution that was barely a year old and still solving the most basic problems of existence \u2014 what rooms to use, what equipment to acquire, how to make a medical school function in a village with rural simplicity and no urban infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was, for the first period, the entire department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pathology museum he created was characteristic of his approach: meticulous, purposeful, and made from whatever was available. He collected mounted specimens, photographs, and illustrations framed between X-ray plates \u2014 using X-ray film as mounting material because that is what was to hand. He introduced side-room laboratories \u2014 small diagnostic units within hospital wards where house officers could perform essential tests: white cell counts, haemoglobin measurements, malaria detection, urine glucose analysis \u2014 bringing the diagnostic function closer to the patient and reducing the delay between clinical suspicion and laboratory confirmation. By the time he left MGIMS in 1976, ten such side-room laboratories were operational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He pioneered mobile diagnostic services, taking pathology to outreach camps in Deoli and Pulgaon \u2014 rural patients receiving accurate diagnoses at locations accessible to them, integrating pathology with public health in exactly the way the Gandhian ethos of the institution demanded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He developed histopathology services specifically calibrated to the diseases that defined rural India in that era: leprosy, tuberculosis, and filariasis. Working closely with Dr. K.V. Desikan on leprosy and Dr. A.R. Shukla on ophthalmology, he refined diagnostic techniques for leprosy ocular involvement \u2014 work that helped preserve the eyesight of leprosy patients who might otherwise have gone blind. Pathology, to him, was not confined to the laboratory. It was a clinical tool, and its purpose was the patient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faculty joined him gradually: Dr. G.S. Gehlot in 1973, then Dr. Narang, Dr. Lele, Dr. Nasiruddin Khan, and Dr. S.M. Sharma \u2014 several of them MBBS graduates who later obtained their MDs and returned to lead the department they had first entered as junior faculty. The succession he created was as much about the people he formed as the systems he established.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the Pathology department relocated to the new college building in 1973, the move happened on a Sunday, organised entirely by Dr. Agrawal and the 1970 batch \u2014 microscopes, slides, specimen jars, microtomes, staining equipment, records, and furniture, packed and transported by students and their professor together. By evening, he had brought the entire batch to his home and fed them. It was the kind of day that a batch remembers fifty years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The MGIMS library in 1969 was a small room beside the Biochemistry and Pathology laboratories: a table, two chairs, an almirah, and thirty-five books. Dr. Agrawal looked at it and saw what it could become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He persuaded Dr. Sushila Nayar to allocate larger space and funds. He brought books from his own collection. He reached out to colleagues and encouraged donations. Dr. I.D. Singh, the first principal, donated his personal collection. The shelves filled. At one point, half the books on display were donated. The small room became two large halls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He called it his child. This was not rhetorical. When the monsoon rains came through open windows and books began to soak, he rushed home, returned with old clothes \u2014 including one of his own shirts \u2014 and mopped the floor himself until the last puddle had dried. A pathologist in old clothes, mopping a library floor in the rain, because the books mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Santosh Gupta, from the 1970 batch, remembered what it was like to be Dr. Agrawal’s postgraduate student approaching their qualifying examinations. Knowing that Sevagram’s limited patient volume could not provide the exposure needed, Agrawal sent his students to BJ Medical College, Pune, for intensive immersion in haematology and histopathology months before the exams. Pune offered a flood of slides and specimens and seasoned pathologists. When they returned to Sevagram, Gupta said, they no longer hesitated. When an examiner placed a slide under the microscope, they diagnosed with confidence. “Dr. Agrawal hadn’t just trained us,” Gupta recalled. “He had prepared us for the real world.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This habit of mind \u2014 thinking not about what was convenient for the institution but about what his students needed \u2014 extended beyond Sevagram. When Dr. Agrawal moved to BJ Medical College in Pune as Dean after leaving MGIMS in 1976, he used his position to open the door for MGIMS students who needed postgraduate places that Sevagram, which did not yet offer postgraduate courses, could not provide. Students from the 1969 through 1972 batches found their way to Pune through his deliberate intervention: Rajendra Deodhar and Bhakti Dastane from 1969; Pramod Gupta, Rajiv Hivre, Anilkumar Jain, and others from 1970; Govind Bang, Surinder Bajwa, Dilip Gode, and others from 1971; Krishan Dutt Bharadwaj and others from 1972. He had left Sevagram. He had not left his students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At BJ Medical College, he introduced what became known as his “ting-ting” seminars \u2014 named for the sound of the slide box \u2014 requiring postgraduate students to make real-time diagnoses from unknown slides. The department he led there conducted over a thousand clinical post-mortems. He subsequently served as Dean at GMC Aurangabad and VMGMC Solapur before returning to BJMC Pune, and spent a decade after retirement shaping the pathology department at Bharati Vidyapeeth, Pune, building another museum. He published fifty research papers and led national pathology conferences. His students called him Bhishmacharya \u2014 the elder teacher whose guidance shaped their careers and instilled in them a sense of purpose that outlasted the curriculum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His wife Padma, Professor of Anatomy, died before him. Their daughter Naina, who had grown up watching her parents build a medical institution in a Gandhian village, died a year before her father after a courageous struggle with breast cancer. Dr. Agrawal died on March 25, 2022, aged eighty-eight. Their son Neeraj, an oncologist at Duke Raleigh, and daughter Nita, a radiologist, both practice in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had built a pathology department in a place that had nothing. He had built a library from thirty-five books. He had sent his students, on his own initiative, to Nagpur and Pune to get what Sevagram could not yet give them. He had built a museum in his retirement. He was always building something \u2014 spaces, systems, futures, the careers of people who would carry forward what he had started in the dry dust of Sevagram in 1970.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“His dedication was infectious,” Satish Sharma said. “In a place with few resources, he built a department with sheer willpower and sweat.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sacks came from Nagpur every Sunday. The shelves filled. The library survived the monsoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"