Remembering Kanu Chatterjee: A Gentle Giant of Cardiology.

brief battle with cancer. His passing has created an irretrievable loss for the field of cardiovascular medicine, because he was the essence of a clinician-teacher-investigator. Kanu was soft-spoken, kind, and wise; he was a practitioner of extraordinary skill, and spiritual. We were privileged to know this gentle giant of cardiology. while still living in a refugee camp in Calcutta. He moved to England in 1963, where he completed additional training in medicine and cardiology at St. George's Hospital and the Royal Brompton Hospital, earning membership in the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and London. Kanu rapidly established his reputation as a brilliant clinical cardiologist. then the director of car-diology at Cedars-Sinai, recruited Kanu to join the Division of Cardiology and eventually run the coronary care unit and the National Institutes of Health–sponsored Myocardial Infarction Research Unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During his 4-year tenure at Cedars-Sinai, Kanu achieved a mythical status as a dedicated, hardworking, and brilliant clinician with outstanding bedside diagnostic skills and great empathy for his patients. Around that time, the Swan-Ganz catheter was introduced into clinical medicine, and Kanu published several seminal papers on the hemo-dynamic spectrum in acute myocardial infarction and heart failure. In 1975, Dr Chatterjee moved to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) with his longtime friend and colleague, Bill Parmley, MD, who had also been at Cedars Sinai at that time. He left behind many fond memories and a fantastic legacy. I (P.K.S.) was most fortunate to meet this remarkable human being at UCSF in late 1975. I wanted to work with him, but in his usual selfless manner, he felt that my professional interests would be better served at Cedars-Sinai because he felt that the cardiology department at UCSF at that time was not as developed as at Cedars-Sinai. I was always thankful to Kanu for that sage advice, which shaped my own career. I was personally honored to give the inaugural Docey and Kanu Chatterjee Lecture at the Annual Scientific Sessions of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) in 2014. Kanu continued his distinguished clinical , teaching, and investigative career at UCSF, earning numerous accolades for his role as a bedside teacher and skilled clini-cian. His gentle bedside manner, together with phenomenal skill in examining the patient, taught the house staff about the critical information one can obtain from a well-directed history and superb physical examination. His calm approach …