2.19
Poverty Of Thoughts
Dr B.S. Chaubey’s famous Words
Dr. B.S. Chaubey. The name alone stirred a familiar mix of awe and unease. He could be warm one moment and glacial the next. His mind worked like a scalpel—quick, clean, and merciless. He sliced through confusion and exposed the diagnosis we had missed, often in minutes.
For nearly twenty-five years, he ruled the Department of Medicine at GMC Nagpur. Ward 23—his ward—was a crucible. Young doctors were forged there. Some came out tempered. Some came out singed. A few came out broken.
He had no patience for mediocrity. His temper was famous, his standards unforgiving, and his sarcasm sharp enough to draw blood.
In 1979, I was a Unit 1 House Officer, stretched thin between Ward 23 and the Kidney Unit. Mondays were a deluge. Forty new patients would pour in, spill into the corridors, and end up on mattresses on the floor. We worked as if time had been outlawed—taking histories, examining patients, chasing reports—fuelled by adrenaline and fear. Sleep became a rumour.
Tuesday morning. 7:59 a.m.
Dr. Chaubey’s blue Fiat stopped at the porch with a final impatient squeal. He stepped out as if he had arrived for a ceremony. Red tie perfectly knotted. White apron spotless. Shoes polished to a mirror shine. His face carried that thin, unreadable smile. His eyes moved like a hawk’s—quick, alert, hunting.
The ward stiffened. The Grand Rounds had begun.
A familiar phalanx formed around me—Jalgaonkar, Sarda, Pendsey, Kalamkar, Subhedar, Wasnik, Kane, Mundle, Srivastava. Nurses Bansod and Lalamma stood ready with files. Even our seniors—Dr. G.K. Dubey and Dr. S.M. Patil—looked attentive. Under Chaubey, nobody was truly senior.
He moved fast: malaria, ulcers, cirrhosis, TB—case after case, briskly dismissed or neatly settled. Then he stopped at Bed Number Five, as if something had tugged at his sleeve.
“Present the case,” he said.
I had been awake for nearly seventy-two hours. I was unbathed, rumpled, and sticky with fatigue. I knew even my unshaven face would irritate him. I swallowed and began.
The patient was sixteen. Both legs paralysed. Numbness below the navel. Bladder distended.
“Kalantri,” he cut in, voice low. “Diagnosis?”
My heart began to thud. My mouth went dry.
“Guillain–Barré syndrome, sir,” I said, and even tried to pronounce it the way the books wanted—Ghee-yan Ba-ray—as if a French accent could rescue a weak answer.
There was a silence so heavy it felt physical.
Then the storm broke.
His nostrils flared. His jaw tightened. With one sharp movement he pulled the blanket off the boy’s legs and pointed to the abdomen.
“Look!” he barked. “No sensory level? Bladder like a drum. Spasticity!”
A small muscle twitched at his temple—his warning signal, the tremor before the thunder.
“Textbook acute transverse myelitis,” he said, each word landing like a slap. “And you missed it. Something so obvious!”
My ears burned. The ward seemed to shrink around me.
He turned to Dr. S.M. Patil and shook his head, not even pretending to keep it private.
“Who sends idiots to Medicine these days?” he asked—loud enough for nurses, students, patients, and even the bedpans to hear.
And then came the line he was famous for, his words slightly twisted by facial palsy, yet delivered with perfect aim:
“Poverty of thoughts and bankruptcy of ideas.”
Coming from a vernacular school, English had always been my steep climb. His effortless accent made the sentence sting twice—first for what it meant, and then for how beautifully he said it.
I stood there wrecked, while he moved on to Bed Six without a backward glance.
Forty-five years have passed since that morning. Dr. Chaubey is gone, but that voice still visits me at odd moments—especially when I am stuck and tempted to settle for the first easy diagnosis.
“Bankruptcy of ideas.”
My colleagues remember it too. Sometimes it comes up as a joke over tea. Sometimes as a warning, when someone is about to miss the obvious.
Was it brutal? Yes.
Did it break me? For a day, it did.
But it also did something else. It shattered my complacency. It taught me to look again, to examine again, to think again. It pushed me—rudely, yes—towards clinical reasoning.
Ward 23 gave me many things: sleepless nights, aching feet, and a few scars that still smart when I touch them. But it also gave me the habit of thinking straight.
And for that, even for that humiliation, I remain grateful.