KARACHI: Dr S.M. Rab, said to be the longest serving physician of the country and well respected in the healthcare community, passed away on Monday morning in Karachi. He was 85.

Family friends and relatives said he had symptoms of a brain tumour that finally caused his death. He was among a few medical professionals who refused to retire from the profession till the last day of their lives.

Dr Rab was born to a senior public servant in Patna in the Indian state of Bihar in 1929. He studied in his native city and completed the MBBS from the Patna Medical College.

He later went to London where he did his MRCP, but then opted not to return to India. Instead, he landed in Dhaka, then capital of East Pakistan, and joined the Dhaka Medical College as an assistant professor where he taught many doctors who later excelled in the profession.

“I used to call him my `grand teacher’ because he had taught my mother in Dhaka,” said Dr Tipu Sultan, himself a prominent member of the medical fraternity and a former president of the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA).

For Dr Sultan and several other doctors, the late Dr Rab was a brilliant teacher and an excellent clinician.

“He had the rare knack for spot diagnosis, a gift that most doctors cannot attain throughout their life,” said Dr Mirza Ali Azhar, the PMA’s secretary general.

Dr Rab was the founder member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan (CPSP) and he held the institution so dear that even his funeral prayers were held in a mosque on the CPSP’s premises. After the fall of Dhaka, Dr Rab moved to Karachi where he joined the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) in 1972 and retired as head of its department of medicine in 1990.

He was specialist of almost all disciplines of medicine and his contemporaries said he could treat a heart patient as expertly as someone suffering from neurological problems.

“He was an out-and-out professional. In most cases, he even did not go for taking a patient’s pulse and could diagnose just by looking at a patient,” said one of many students of Dr Rab.

Professor Dr Rab taught in almost all medical colleges and universities in the country and was an examiner for the Royal College of Physicians in the UK.

He worked as health minister of Sindh for some time during retired General Pervez Musharraf’s era in 2000. His colleagues call him a gentle human being and a great companion.

He is survived by his wife, two daughters and a son.

A large number of his colleagues, relatives and students attended the funeral. He was buried in the Defence Graveyard.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2014