Shane Halpe
Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

Professor Kolitha Harischandra Sellahewa entered my life in 2015 during my final-year professorial appointment in medicine at the Neville Fernando Teaching Hospital in Sri Lanka. Students spoke of him with a mixture of awe and fear: he was said to be strict, uncompromising, and intolerant of carelessness when a patient’s life or dignity was at stake. I expected to be intimidated. I did not expect to be changed.

During one grand ward round, he questioned me about almost every patient in the ward: dengue, diabetes, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, meningitis, stroke. His questions were not designed to show off obscure knowledge. Rather, they came from the bedside: the pulse, the joint, the respiratory note, the cranial nerve, the small contradiction between the history and the examination.

That distinction has stayed with me. To know medicine is one thing; to notice is another. Professor Sellahewa seemed able to read a patient with disciplined attention. A glance, a pause, or a single question could expose what others had missed. In difficult cases, especially in dengue, someone would eventually whisper, “We need Professor Sellahewa.”

Now, years later, when I examine a patient or teach a student, I still feel his presence beside me. I check the pulse more carefully. I watch the face before I reach for the investigation. I listen for what the patient has not yet said. From examining joints to auscultating lungs, from assessing cranial nerves to interpreting a clinical silence, I still follow what many of us came to call “the Sellahewa technique.”

He was not only a clinician at the bedside. He was a teacher who prepared with almost monastic seriousness. I remember listening to him deliver an oration on snakebite management during the Annual Academic Sessions of the Ceylon College of Physicians in 2017. He held the audience in complete attention. The lecture was eloquent, precise, and calm, but its force came from preparation. He could spend weeks or months refining a single lecture until every word had a purpose.

That same care appeared in ordinary arrangements. As a demonstrator in the Department of Medicine, I watched him transform examinations, symposiums, and hospital events into disciplined productions. He inspected schedules, hospitality, and even decorations. Once, when the floral display did not satisfy him, he arranged it himself using flowers from a nearby garden. For him, excellence was not reserved for dramatic clinical moments. It applied to everything entrusted to him.

His humanity was equally memorable. He valued tradition, culture, and Buddhism deeply, not as decoration but as a way of living. He enjoyed simple Sri Lankan food: kurakkan thalapa, boiled manioc, and plain tea. He delighted when students organized a gathering with traditional food. Meditation, charity, and service were practical commitments. He marked birthdays and significant milestones not by self-display, but by giving to others, especially the poor.

There were also moments that were terrifying then and amusing now. When a student failed badly, he might command, “Disappear! You should be sent to the moon or Mars!” His stare alone could make us review an entire textbook overnight. Yet beneath the thunder there was responsibility. He made us sharper because he believed clinical indifference was dangerous.

He also defended his students. Those of us from SAITM knew what it meant to be questioned or dismissed by the wider profession. Professor Sellahewa corrected us without mercy, but he protected us with conviction. That combination taught us something rare: a teacher’s duty is not only to judge the learner, but also to stand beside them when unfairly judged by others.

I now understand that his greatest lesson was not simply how to diagnose disease. It was how to form a clinical conscience. He taught that medicine requires observation before opinion, preparation before performance, courage before popularity, and service before recognition. His life reminded us that a doctor is shaped not only by examinations and textbooks, but by the moral presence of teachers who insist that we become better than we are.

I stand where I am today because of his discipline, his teaching, and his belief in us even when we doubted ourselves. I hope, in my own work with patients and students, to carry forward even a fraction of what he embodied: meticulous, compassionate, human-centered medicine. Thank you, sir, for shaping not only the doctor I am, but the human being I continue to strive to become.