3.2
The Giants of Medicine
Three teachers who built a department
The 8 AM Classroom
A medical department isn’t built only with bricks, beds, and budgets. It is built with people—especially the kind who stay long enough to shape the place in their own image.
When I joined MGIMS, the Department of Medicine was held up by three men: Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, and Dr. Ulhas Jajoo. They were different in temperament and style. Dr. Gupta was steady and meticulous. Dr. Jain was sharp, spare, and unsentimental. Dr. Jajoo was the humanist who never forgot the person behind the disease.
Every morning at 8 AM, they met in the HOD’s chamber for what we residents quietly called court proceedings. ECGs were placed on the table like evidence. Diagnoses were argued. Mistakes were exposed. And learning—real learning—happened in full public view.
I walked in their shadow first. Later, I had the privilege of walking alongside them.
Dr. O.P. Gupta: The Quiet Builder
Dr. Gupta was the anchor.
I joined his unit as a lecturer in June 1983, and my first impression of him was not fear, but warmth. Soon after my wedding, he and his wife, Geeta, invited Bhavana and me for lunch. I was a junior lecturer—barely known, easily ignored. They treated us like family. That small gesture stayed with me, because it told me what kind of seniors they were.
Dr. Gupta had joined MGIMS in 1971, when the department was still finding its feet. In those days, there were only a handful of physicians. They did everything—OPD, wards, teaching, emergencies, and administration—often in the same breath.
For years, his unit ran out of the old Birla guest house. The walls peeled. The tube lights glowed weakly. The wards looked more like dormitories than a hospital. But he practised medicine with the seriousness of a man in a metropolitan teaching hospital.
He also had a strict streak. Living in MLK Colony, he would sometimes appear in the ward without warning—just to check if the residents were awake, alert, and doing what they were supposed to do. It kept us nervous. It also kept us honest.
As Dean (1994–2002), he changed the way MGIMS examined its students. He pushed for MCQ-based entrance exams, bringing more objectivity into a system that could otherwise bend with influence and mood. It was one of those reforms that people resist at first—and thank you for later.
Even after a heart attack and bypass surgery, he never stopped learning. When we moved to the new building in 2012, his office sat close to mine. I would often see him bent over a computer screen, reading, searching, figuring things out quietly—like a student who never quite graduated.
When he finally retired on 31 July 2023, at the age of 80, it felt like the end of a long, steady sentence. The department didn’t just lose a senior professor. It lost a habit of discipline.
Dr. A.P. Jain: The Clinician Who Used Fewer Words
If Dr. Gupta was the steady hand, Dr. Jain was the sharp blade.
He came from Uttar Pradesh and joined MGIMS in 1974. For a while, he considered Psychiatry, but Medicine claimed him completely. Dr. Jain believed in the bedside more than the machine. He disliked unnecessary tests, unnecessary labels, and unnecessary treatment. He had no patience for medical theatre.
He often quoted Osler: “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”
With Dr. Jain, it was not a quotation. It was a working style.
He could be intimidating. His wit could sting. If you tried to cover ignorance with confidence, he could puncture you with one line. But behind that sharpness lived something solid: a clinician’s integrity. Patients trusted him because he did not perform. He assessed, decided, and acted.
In 1995, when Dr. Sushila Nayar suffered a massive heart attack, she chose Dr. Jain as her physician—without running to Delhi or a “bigger” name. That decision said more about him than any award could.
He also built services that quietly changed the hospital: the Dialysis Unit, the Geriatric OPD, and the DNB Family Medicine programme, which later became one of the strongest in the country.
When Parkinson’s disease arrived in 2018, he didn’t announce it. He simply carried it. Even with trembling hands and an unsteady gait, he continued ward rounds, journal clubs, and teaching. He did not dramatise his struggle. He just refused to leave.
He retired on the same day as Dr. Gupta—31 July 2023. Two pillars gone together. It felt like the hospital had suddenly become quieter.
Dr. Ulhas Jajoo: The Humanist in a Hurry
And then there was Ulhas.
To the world, he is Dr. Ulhas Jajoo. To me, he has always been Ulhas Bhaiyya.
Our story began much earlier, in Nagpur, when I was still a student and he was the senior who believed newspapers were more dangerous than cigarettes. He cancelled our newspaper subscription because he thought it distracted us from studies. At the time, I found it strict. Later, I understood it was his way of protecting two young boys from themselves.
In 1982, when I stood uncertain at the edge of private practice and hospital life, it was Ulhas who looked at me and said, almost casually,
“Why don’t you join us at Sevagram?”
That one sentence changed the direction of my life.
Ulhas practised medicine like an art, not a transaction. He trusted experience and intuition. He would often remind us, with a half-smile, that statistics talk in averages, while patients arrive one by one.
His ward rounds had their own rhythm. Khadi shirt. Chappals. A crowd of students behind him. Questions fired like arrows—not to embarrass, but to awaken. He didn’t only ask about symptoms. He asked about money, family, fear, and the long walk to the hospital.
He was a storyteller, and that made his teaching memorable. Students didn’t just remember his prescriptions. They remembered his tone. His patience. His ethics.
Every year on February 14, social media fills with tributes to him. People write about the kind of doctor they became because of him. One student once wrote something that stayed with me:
“I saw Jajoo Sir speaking with patients with compassion, and I wanted to be just like him.”
Ulhas taught us that the most sophisticated instrument in medicine is not the CT scan. It is the ear. And the time to listen.
What They Left Behind
Gupta, Jain, and Jajoo built the department I later inherited. They showed us that you could practise serious medicine in a village. They proved that a hospital does not need fancy machines to produce good doctors—it needs standards, discipline, and a moral spine.
They were giants.
And for many of us, including me, it was enough that they let us walk beside them.