Meet the beloved Muslim professor who revolutionised the pathology course

A few days back, as Muslims worldwide began fasting for Ramadan, a social media user posted a picture of a modestly dressed man sitting on the floor and eating from a paper plate.

“Almost every new doctor in America is indebted to this man for their education,” said the viral post, going on to claim that he has had an impact bigger than the Khan Academy, credited for revolutionising online learning.

The person in the picture is Dr Husain Abdul Sattar, Professor of Pathology at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

Sattar created Pathoma, which has become an indispensable resource for medical students in the United States and other parts of the world.

It is a website where Sattar uploads lectures on the fundamentals of pathology, one of the most difficult courses for second-year medical students. He has condensed the voluminous subject into a digestible 204-page textbook.

His teaching style, which involves using doodles to explain lymphoma and carcinoma, his soft-spokenness, and his humility have earned him a cult-like following. One of his students called him the “Godfather of pathology,” while others regularly show off his autographs on copies of Pathoma. Students have also put Sattar’s face on t-shirts and coffee mugs.

In 2018, a UChicago Medicine article called him an “unlikely celebrity”.

But before he became a famous doctor and teacher, before people had heard of him, and before Pathoma, he was among half a dozen students at a seminary in Pakistan trying to understand the intricacies of the Hadith – the sayings of Prophet Muhammad.

And that is where he learned his unique teaching style.

Ahead of the curve

On October 14, 1980, shares of a biotechnology company called Genentech went public in the US, the first biotech stock to be traded on the bourses. A wild frenzy ensued among the investors. The share opened at $35 and closed the day at $71.

“One of the most spectacular market debuts in recent history,” announced The Wall Street Journal.

Among the people who were taken in by the excitement on TV news channels and newspapers about Genentech was Husain Sattar, then just a precocious 8-year-old.

“If you would have asked me at that time what I was going to be, I wanted to be a CEO of a company,” Sattar, now in his 50s and a breast cancer surgical pathologist, tells TRT World.

Sattar’s parents were doctors who had moved to Chicago from Karachi, Pakistan, in the late 1960s. On the side, his father dabbled in the stock market, and Sattar, the eldest among three siblings, would sit by his side and look at the company tickers sliding across the TV screen.

For someone his age, it’s unusual to get absorbed in the complex and number-laden world of stock investment. But Sattar had a habit of doing out-of-the-way things.

In sixth grade, he prevailed upon his parents to let him fly to Alabama by himself to take part in an educational camp for young space enthusiasts.

For a science class project in eighth grade, he collected spiders from his basement and sprinkled them with alcohol to see if intoxication affected how spiders weave webs. It did, and the project won him an award at the state level.

In the late 1980s, as a 15-year-old high school student, Sattar travelled to California to attend a two-week workshop on recombinant DNA at the University of Pacific.

Recombinant DNA was still a relatively new science for most college students. Yet, Sattar was allowed to extend his stay for another six weeks.

“It was there I learned how to clone DNA and how to sequence it.” That experience set off a life-long affair with the lab.

At the same time, Sattar says, he was still into doing things that boys his age did, like being part of the school football team—even if he appeared a bit underweight for such a physically demanding sport.

“If you can manage to find my old high school yearbook, there's actually a picture of me on the football team.”

Over the next few years, first in high school and later as an undergrad at the University of Chicago, Sattar became part of the labs of two famous scientists, Dr Richard Morimoto and Jeffrey Bluestone.

Initially, he wanted to pursue an academic career but then settled on going to medical school. Along the way, a question started to bother him: what did he know about his religion, Islam?

Bosnia or Taqi Usmani

Growing up, Sattar often saw his father reciting the Quran. But his parents, who were trying to adjust to a new life in America, were never overtly religious.

“There was a lot of silent religiosity in my home but it just hadn’t yet trickled into me. It was really in college I had my own personal awakening. I began to take my religion much more seriously.

By the time Sattar was about to graduate from the University of Chicago in 1993, the world was waking up to the atrocities committed against Bosnian Muslims.

There was a global outpouring of sympathy. Different countries were sending aid and relief to the displaced people. Sattar, who had by then become a key member of the Muslim Students Association of Chicago, got involved with the Bosnian cause.

“There was a genocide going on in Bosnia to the extent that I actually wanted to go to Bosnia to do relief work.”

Worried that his son would put himself in harm’s way, Sattar’s father offered him a proposition: why doesn't he go to Pakistan, where he can attend a religious seminary?

So, in early 1994, Sattar spent a month at Darul Uloom Korangi, a traditional religious school of Mufti Taqi Usmani, a renowned Islamic scholar.

Every day, from 8 in the morning till noon, Sattar went to the seminary and sat in different classes. That was his first brush with traditional Islamic learning.

But Mufti Usmani advised him to return to the US to complete his studies. The scholar also told Sattar that if he wanted to learn about religion, he had to study the Arabic language.

Back in the US after a month, Sattar married and started four-year medical school at the University of Chicago (In the US, medical students first have to complete a 4-year undergrad degree before enrolling in medical school). But after three years, he decided to take a long break to work on his religious understanding.

Again he travelled to Pakistan. For the next three years, he studied at Jamia Faridia in Islamabad and spent time in Damascus, Syria, studying Arabic.

“Most of my mentors, even my parents, didn't think that it was the best decision, and I was given lots of arguments as to why I should not do this. ‘Why would you disrupt medical education?’ ‘You've spent 3.5 years in medical school.’ ‘You have six months to graduate’.”

At the Islamabad seminary, where he spent two years studying the rigorous orthodox Islamic curriculum, he ended up in the classroom of one Mufti Muhammad Amin.

That scholar wouldn’t bring any book or notes to the classroom and would talk to the students off the top of his head.

“The energy that he brought to the classroom and the style in which he delivered his lessons and the love and concern that he had for his students just really rubbed off on me.”

That experience rekindled the little teacher that was inside Sattar. “Did the exposure to him and his style influence it? Definitely.”

A pathological worry

At the end of his second year in medical school, Sattar encountered Clinical Pathophysiology, a core course that can become a headache for students.

“The reason that this subject is overwhelming is because it requires you to take all of the knowledge that you gained previously and translate that into human disease.

“So that you're understanding the foundation of human disease and you're covering all of the different types of diseases in a very short period of time in preparation for actually seeing patients as a 3rd and 4th-year student and for the rest of your career.”

Sattar himself was not interested in pathology and instead wanted to become a physician to serve humanity after he had seen much poverty and suffering in Pakistan.

However, the years he spent working in labs eventually led him to pathology, as he was more comfortable analysing blood samples and tissues than directly engaging with patients.

By the time he started lecturing medical students in pathology courses, it dawned upon him that something was amiss in how the subject was being taught.

“The students were too caught up in the details and they weren't seeing the bigger picture. They were seeing the trees, but they weren't seeing the forest.”

Sattar quickly realised that students were being forced to absorb too much information that they would acquire as residents and doctors in later years in any case.

For instance, the students would memorise details about different types of cancers - bone cancer, which is called osteosarcoma or adenocarcinoma, the cancer of the glands - without being able to connect them.

“I could see that they memorised all the names of the little cancers, but they couldn't see the bigger picture of how to decide which cancer falls in the bigger categories.”

The result of his effort to make pathology easier for students to comprehend was pathoma.com, a website he registered in 2006 where students can access his lectures and book against a nominal fee.

And to make the subject interesting, Sattar, following in the footsteps of his seminary teacher who would walk into class and wouldn’t use notes during lectures, sits and just talks about the principles of pathology with his students.