Dr Anita M Borges (19 November 1947–18 September 2025)

Dr Anita Maria Borges was perhaps the best, and best-known, diagnostic cancer pathologist that India has produced. Readers of this journal would be aware that she was a member of its editorial board.

Anita was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), studied in St Agnes’ High School and St Xavier’s College, and then at Topiwala National Medical College and BYL Nair Charitable Hospital, all in Mumbai. She then trained in England (The Royal Marsden Hospital, London, where she worked towards a Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA, before returning to India in 1981 and working at the Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH) for nearly a quarter of a century. She was no stranger to the TMH. Her father, Dr Ernest Borges, had been a pioneering cancer surgeon in the same hospital from the 1940s to 1969 and had also been its Superintendent. Anita’s reputation and the quality of her work, right from when she was a student, were such that she was allowed that rare distinction—she was permitted to work in the USA without the need to appear for the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) examination. She also turned down job offers from both foreign institutes, one of which was in 1985, well after her return to India.

Her plan was to pursue the humanities after retirement from TMH. However, retirement from TMH was followed by long stints as a pathologist at the Wellspring/SRL Laboratories and the SL Raheja Hospital, and finally at the Centre for Oncopathology, founded by the Tata Trusts (all in Mumbai).

She used every opportunity possible to be an educator. After all, teaching was always her first love. She led the Tata Memorial Centre Travelling School of Oncopathology, and her group crisscrossed the country, teaching not only tumour histopathology but also technical aspects of running a laboratory (to laboratory technologists) and holding tumour boards (for the benefit and knowledge of treating physicians). During the Covid-19 outbreak, she and her colleague, Sumeet Gujral, started an online lecture series in pathology, which was, and remains, hugely popular.

Anita was a Roman Catholic by birth and had Catholic tastes. Her reading ranged from topics related to Hindu religion, to Oliver Strange’s Westerns (the Sudden series) and Frontline magazine. She clearly had more than 24 hours in her day because she found time to read copious amounts of literature, see many movies, and, of course, was up to date on the latest advances in medicine. I once saw on her table, a register in which she maintained a tabular list of all the journals in the library, as well as the issue numbers, with a tick mark which denoted an issue that she had read. That register ensured that she didn’t miss any issue of any journal! She was so quick at seeing a slide and analysing it, and moving on to the next slide, that we used to refer to it as the slapping glass phenomenon.

Though she was remarkably good at all areas of cancer histopathology, her understanding of general pathology was exceptional. This meant that, although she specialized in head and neck pathology, she was also exceptional at lymph node pathology, melanoma, and gestational trophoblastic disease (fields which are especially difficult to grasp). She attributed much of her understanding of medicine to having faithfully read the clinicopathological conferences of the New England Journal of Medicine and the initial pages of Harrison’s Textbook of Internal Medicine (the algorithms for evaluation of a patient’s symptoms). Like her, I advise medical students that I now meet to read the clinicopathological conferences on a regular basis, to understand the logic of medical analysis.

Her repartee was unparalleled—when I once mentioned to her that I had worked in 3 of 4 teaching colleges in Bombay— Sion, KEM, and JJ, she responded in a flash, ‘I see that you spared Nair Hospital’! A far more important thing about her was her generosity—in spirit as well as in kind. Though she never ever used the phrase itself, she clearly believed in and practised the golden rule, as well as the dictum of ‘forgive and forget’.

A couple of months after she passed away, the Practising Oral Pathologists and Microbiologists Association announced that 19 November (her birthday) would henceforth be observed by the association as National Oral, Head and Neck Onco-pathology Day, and would feature a Dr Anita Borges Memorial Oration Lecture.

There have been numerous obituaries and memories of Dr Borges in the popular press as well as the journals and newsletters in India and abroad. All quite correctly express the opinion that she was unique and a class apart. She will be missed greatly by her patients, colleagues, students, and family and friends.