Dr. Shanta Krishnamurthy

The first time that I saw Dr Shanta Krishnamurthy (SCK) was in 1989, when she delivered an excellent lecture to us postgraduate students on the pathology of the urinary bladder. (I was then mystified by her continual references to the ‘magic number of 7;’ I did not know, then, that the normal urothelium is believed to have up to 7 layers of cells). Soon after, in 1990, I joined Tata Memorial Hospital as a resident, where I learnt that if I had any problems during grossing of a specimen, the go-to person for a solution was SCK. She was easily approachable (as indeed were most of the other consultants), exceptionally good at orienting a specimen and at advising what sections to take, to get the maximum information out of it. There was, however, one minor problem. Because she was absent-minded, sometimes she would forget that she had been invited to help us out, and we would wait patiently and then go again and remind her.

She was a superb teacher and diagnostic pathologist. She recently told me that she kept up to date by listening to lectures on YouTube and making notes in which she recorded the specific time when certain statements were made; this was very useful when she had to refer to the lecture to relearn something.

On a personal note, my first paper in the medical literature (a phrase that I learnt from her for the first time) was because of her suggestion to me to write up a case report and guide me through all of it (PMID: 8300182). I have written and edited a fair amount over the past 3 decades, and it is to her that I owe much for my foray into medical writing. For this and other reasons, for the past 20 years, it was my routine to call her up on September 5 to wish her for ‘Teachers’ Day’; her response was invariably ‘I was expecting your call’, and we would then chat for about one hour.

In 1993, we were seeing a case, and we disagreed about the diagnosis (of an ovarian tumour). A day later, we learnt that it was I who was correct. Most people would have been unhappy at this, but not SCK. She proudly told all and sundry about how her student had overtaken her, even if only momentarily. That was evidence that she was teaching her students to think and analyse, and she was delighted.

She also knew when to pull up a student. In September 1995, I made an egregious error on a thyroid fine needle aspirate. SCK learnt of it at the frozen section evaluation of the specimen and gave me a blasting as I had never received before. A few days later (on my birthday!), she saw the paraffin sections, and to my misfortune, she and I were reporting together. When she saw the error, she gave me a firing that was worse than what I had gone through earlier. Clearly, she was not aware of the concept of double jeopardy, in which a person cannot be accused twice of the same crime.

She had no recollection of the earlier incident. …she was truly absent-minded!