Dr. V. R. Khanolkar

Vasant Ramji Khanolkar is called the father of pathology in India, and the claim survives scrutiny. He was the first Indian pathologist of international standing, and he worked across a range that would be implausible in a modern career: cancer research, blood-group genetics, epidemiology and leprosy.

He was Professor of Pathology at Grant Medical College and at Seth G. S. Medical College in Bombay, and on retiring from teaching in 1941 he joined Tata Memorial Hospital as Chief Pathologist. Invited to head its laboratory and direct its research, he oversaw the transformation of that laboratory into a postgraduate department and then into the Indian Cancer Research Centre, inaugurated on 30 December 1952. He directed the ICRC from its founding until 1973 — an institution that became, through later reorganisation, part of the lineage of ACTREC and the Tata Memorial Centre.

What distinguishes his record is the breadth of it. His published interests took in leprosy, reproductive physiology, blood groups and medical education, at a time when Indian pathology was still largely a teaching subject organised around preserved specimens. He treated it instead as a research discipline with a claim on public health.

He died on 29 October 1978 at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Bombay. The historiography of Indian medicine has returned to him repeatedly since — the Indian Journal of Cancer on the ICRC years, the National Medical Journal of India on his first period as a working pathologist between 1924 and 1941 — which is itself a measure of how much of the discipline traces back to him.