Her life

Laxmi Mohanty

A story in chapters.

Chapter one

From Utkal to Virginia

Dr. Mohanty's medical career began in 1965, at SCB Medical College of the University of Utkal. She finished her first training there. Then she crossed the world and began again, as every doctor who changes countries must: an internship, then a residency in anatomic and clinical pathology, in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond. She added a year of advanced training in cytopathology, the reading of single cells.

Pathology is the quiet half of medicine. The cardiologist sees the patient. The pathologist sees the tissue, and what she sees becomes the diagnosis. That was the work she chose, and it filled a career.

Chapter two

The heart, under the microscope

She joined the Richmond veterans' hospital as an attending pathologist, and the Department of Pathology at VCU Health as teaching faculty. Her subject was the heart. Not the heart at the bedside, but the heart as tissue: what surgery does to it, and what a transplant does to it.

When a transplanted heart is in trouble, the answer is in a biopsy, a few millimetres of muscle under glass. She read many of them, for many patients, in the years after their transplants. Her research on the heart after surgery and transplantation was published in the journals of the field, the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation and the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, as author and co-author. Her landmark studies appear in Contemporary Management of Patients with Stable Ischemic Heart Disease.

Dr. Mohanty also directed electron microscopy for the Central VA Health System in Richmond: the instrument that sees what no ordinary microscope can.

Chapter three

The teaching goes on

Through all of it, she taught. The record puts it plainly: a versatile academic pathologist, with a record of excellence in clinical work, in the teaching of students and pathology residents, and in high-quality collaborative research.

Today she is Emeritus Associate Professor of Pathology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a fellow of the College of American Pathologists.

And now, with Pramod, she has made a gift so that the teaching goes on: a lectureship in advanced heart disease, for the fellows who come next.