Professor & Head of Pathology \u00b7 Six and a Half Years at Sevagram \u00b7 The Man Who Found a Discovery on a Bicycle and Taught Medicine Where It Lived<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During a practical examination, Dr. Gehlot noticed a student from the 1976 batch who had come from flood-stricken Allahabad. “Where from?” he asked. “Allahabad,” the student replied. Without further preamble, Dr. Gehlot proceeded to question him entirely on the epidemiology and microbiology of diarrhoeal disease \u2014 transforming a routine examination into a lesson directly relevant to what the student had just lived through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was his pedagogy in miniature: no patience for performance, no interest in jargon, complete insistence that medicine remain connected to the world it existed to serve. He had little regard for students who dazzled with terminology but lacked depth. What mattered was whether the knowledge could be applied \u2014 in a flood, in a village, in the specific situation in front of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gopal Sharan Nainaji Gehlot was born on June 15, 1939, in Talwada, a village in Nalchha Tehsil in Dhar district, Madhya Pradesh. He completed his schooling there and moved thirty kilometres to Badwani for his intermediate education, finishing in 1956. Medicine drew him early. He entered Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal, in 1959 and earned his MBBS in July 1964.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Between his MBBS and the MD he would complete in 1972, he spent years in general practice \u2014 establishing a thriving clinic that gave him a clinical breadth unusual in a future pathologist, a grounding in the full spectrum of patient presentation that would later inform how he taught and examined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His MD thesis at MGM Medical College, Indore, took him into the Adivasi heartland of Madhya Pradesh to study leucocyte variations among tribal communities. Research, for him, meant long journeys on foot and bicycle to villages where modern medicine rarely arrived \u2014 the same mode of fieldwork that had characterised the Gandhian leprosy workers in the region and that MGIMS would later build into its institutional DNA. From this work, he identified what would later be recognised as the Pelger-Hu\u00ebt anomaly \u2014 a morphological abnormality in neutrophil nuclei that carries diagnostic significance. It was a genuine discovery, made in the field rather than in a well-equipped laboratory, and it earned him lasting recognition in the discipline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He spent seven and a half years as resident pathologist at MGM Medical College, building expertise across clinical and chemical pathology, bacteriology, serology, morbid anatomy, histopathology, and blood banking. Dr. J.N. Monga, the formidable Professor and Head of Pathology, validated his abilities \u2014 a stamp of approval that carried weight in academic circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the early 1970s, MGIMS had a Reader in Pathology post that had sat vacant for over two and a half years. Dr. R.V. Agrawal, then Head of Pathology, spotted Gehlot’s potential and personally recommended him to Dr. Sushila Nayar. The interview was a quiet affair. Dr. I.D. Singh, the Principal, found in Gehlot a man of few words and firm resolve, and offered him the position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On June 14, 1973 \u2014 one day before his thirty-fourth birthday \u2014 Dr. Gehlot arrived in Sevagram. His salary was \u20b91,042 per month. The department he joined was still in its early years, shaped by Dr. Agrawal’s founding energy but still thin on staff and infrastructure. He worked with quiet diligence, building his expertise in the specific disease profile of rural Vidarbha \u2014 leprosy, tuberculosis, filariasis, the parasitic and infectious conditions that defined the pathology workload of a hospital serving an underserved population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Dr. Agrawal left in 1976, Gehlot took over as Head of Pathology on January 11, adding responsibility for Forensic Medicine \u2014 a discipline Dr. Agrawal had previously managed \u2014 to his existing portfolio. He was not the most conspicuous figure on the MGIMS campus. He did not seek limelight. He ran a department, taught students, supervised postgraduate work, and came back the next day and did it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 8 MLK Colony, Dr. Gehlot lived alone for most of his Sevagram years. His wife Jaswant \u2014 whom he had married on May 25, 1963 \u2014 ran a nursing home in Indore, delivering babies and treating patients with her RMP qualification and diploma in Homeopathy. Their three children, two daughters and a son, stayed in Indore for school. For four years, Sevagram was his home in name; his family was elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His kitchen was a kerosene stove and a few pots. Vidarbha summers were merciless \u2014 the heat clinging through the nights, the air barely moving. His son Sunil, who visited during summer holidays, remembered the only solution available: soak the mosquito nets in water, stretch them over the beds, and hope the night breeze dried them slowly enough to cool the air beneath. Such were the material conditions in which a senior pathologist and department head lived while building an institution that would eventually serve hundreds of thousands of patients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The isolation accumulated. In July 1977, he submitted a resignation. He later withdrew it. In September 1979, he applied through UPSC for a post at Goa Medical College. This time the departure was final. On January 15, 1980, he was relieved of his duties. His Sevagram chapter had lasted six and a half years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He returned to Indore and set up general practice in Tilak Nagar. The pathologist became, by incremental community demand, a trusted neighbourhood doctor \u2014 mornings spent in a bustling clinic diagnosing fevers, anaemias, and infections, two hours in the pathology laboratory, and the rest of the day available to the steady stream of villagers who had learned to trust him. For nearly two decades, until 2011, he worked in both modes simultaneously, the clinical and the diagnostic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He subsequently taught at Aurobindo Medical College in Indore, then at a medical college in Ujjain, and finally at a dental college in Indore \u2014 teaching until his final years with the consistency of someone for whom the activity itself remained worthwhile independent of institutional affiliation or professional status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His son Dr. Sunil Gehlot, who had entered MGIMS with the class of 1988 \u2014 fifteen years after his father arrived in Sevagram \u2014 runs a private surgical practice in Indore. The father had come to build a department; the son had come to be educated in it. Between the two arrivals, MGIMS had become something worth choosing rather than merely something that needed people willing to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Gehlot died on November 18, 2016, aged seventy-seven, of cardiac arrest after a long struggle with colon and prostate cancer. He had found the Pelger-Hu\u00ebt anomaly in an Adivasi village on a bicycle, built a pathology department in a Gandhian medical college on a kerosene stove, and spent the rest of his working life in the service of patients who came to him because they trusted him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The flood student from Allahabad, questioned on diarrhoeal disease in a Sevagram examination hall, would have carried that lesson for a long time. The best teaching tends to find the student where the student actually is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"