Remembering Sadao Otani

Pathology has played a major role in the history of medicine, but, currently, gross morphology is being eclipsed by 3-dimensional imaging. However, pathology is by no means a vestige of the past.

I wish to pay tribute to a pathologist who was legendary in his time but now has largely been forgotten. Sadao Otani was born in 1892 in a village in central Japan ( Figure 1 ). His wife, Isako Makino, was an exemplary Meiji-era woman of courage and grace. From 1926 to 1969, Dr. Otani was a central figure at the Mount Sinai Hospital of New York, where he provided brilliant expertise in diagnostic and surgical pathology for >4 decades. His publications were relatively few ( Figure 2 ); thus, he did not develop a national or international reputation. However, in New York, he was regarded as the epitome of surgical pathologists.