Daily fan mail. Autograph requests. Personalized apparel. An entry on Urban Dictionary.
BY NANCY AVERETT
An MS2’s well-annotated copy of the Pathoma textbook.
In the world of medical education, fame is usually hard to come by. But for Husain Sattar, AB’93, MD’01, whose Pathoma series has touched a nerve with students around the world, it’s all in a day’s work — even if it’s not the one he initially signed up for. “Pathoma, when I put it out, I had no idea what might happen,” Sattar said. “I’m not trying to create a fan base. I’m actually a very private person and I like to avoid the limelight.”
A reluctant celebrity
It was a far cry from the University of Chicago, where he earned his undergraduate and medical degrees and later did his internship, residency and fellowship. Besides the lack of creature comforts, his instructors did not have fancy diplomas from prestigious universities. But there was a Pakistani teacher who made an impression on Sattar — one that planted the seed for Sattar’s wildly successful textbook and video series on pathology known as Pathoma. “This teacher always came to class without notes,” Sattar said, recalling the instructor with the gray beard who smiled often and dressed in the traditional Pakistani garb of loose pants and tunic-like shirt. “He would say, ‘If I can’t tell you about it from the top of my head, then I shouldn’t be telling you about it at all.’ ” The man lectured passionately, as if there were 3,000 people in the room instead of eight, but what the young American medical student found most impressive was his skill distilling colossal amounts of material. “He had this ability to take vast amounts of information and summarize it in the most eloquent, simple, principle-based method,” Sattar said. Fast forward nearly 20 years and that is exactly what thousands of medical students
who use Pathoma say about Sattar. “He has a remarkable gift for clarity,” said Palmer Greene, MS3. “He can take the pathophysiology of any organ system and present the information in a way that makes the entire mechanism click in your head.” Lucy Rubin, a fourth-year at Tufts University School of Medicine, has similar praise: “He has this amazing way of explaining concepts,” she said. “He simplifies things to the most basic elements.”
Seeing the big picture It took years, Sattar says, to get to that point. After two-and-a-half years in the Middle East — he also spent time in Syria — he returned to Chicago to start his fourth year at the Pritzker School of Medicine, worried that he had forgotten what he’d learned while he’d been away. “When I came back, that was the hardest month of my life,” he recalled. “I remembered very little and I was thrown back into that medical school environment, in which there’s not much forgiveness for not knowing things.” Each night he focused on what he needed to know to get through the next day, eventually catching up. At the same time, he started to look at his medical knowledge differently, realizing he
But Sattar’s conversational tone and methodical explanations — blessedly free of rote memorization — have yielded him an international following. When he lectures at Pritzker or visits other medical schools for a review, students line up to have him inscribe their textbooks. And even though email from grateful students streams in every day, he replies to every message he receives. One day last summer, he received a heartfelt message from a student who described how the understanding she’d gained from Pathoma helped her overcome personal tragedy. Occasionally, the adulation verges on the cultish. One student took the time to define Pathoma on Urban Dictionary as “the only way to pass pathology your second year of medical school.” And then there’s the wholly unlicensed “Husain Sattar is my homeboy,” an online store unaffiliated with Pathoma that sells T-shirts, mugs and water bottles emblazoned with Sattar’s faculty picture. Its tagline? “Pathoma is a work of art.” Sattar takes it all in stride, but that doesn’t mean everyone else does. “It’s cute,” he said. “But my mother wants it taken down.”
— Matt Present, MS3
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MEDICINE ON THE MIDWAY
FALL 2017
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