Born at Bhandara near Nagpur, Dr. L. D. Dhawale passed his early years in a village where his father was the school headmaster. He had seen his father using Homoeopathy to successfully treat the villagers who flocked to him in the epidemic of Cholera. As a child he had also watched his father help the poor and the needy with Homoeopathic medicines given free from the stock often replenished by the village merchant. We can trace his insistence on sound clinical judgement, his philanthropy and his love of knowledge to these early influences.
He did his B. A. from Nagpur and then came over to Bombay in order to study for M. B., B. S. During his B. A. years, too, he was helped through Homoeopathy from a prolonged bout of articular rheumatism by his father and later on by himself. He also treated his father for carbuncle, then considered a fatal disease.
His bright academic career in the medical college secured him the coveted post of Tutor in Pathology immediately on completion of the M.B.B.S. in 1914. He set himself up in private practice in 1916 and obtained his M. D. in 1921. When the Seth G. S. Medical College & Hospital was set up in 1926, he was one of the pioneer teachers with an Indian degree, the only stipulation laid down by the donor.
He was a very thoroughgoing, hard but appreciative taskmaster, whose students found his clinical teaching extremely useful. He soon established his reputation as an outstanding clinician and teacher. When he retired in the year 1940, he received the tribute – ‘as a diagnostician, he had few rivals.’
About 1930, he was browsing for books in a Homoeopathic pharmacy and casual enquiry discovered that quite a few qualified medical practitioners were taking an interest in Homoeopathy. Thus was born the Homoeopathic Post Graduate Association, as a study-circle. Priority was given to establishing a good library. Regular monthly clinical meetings were also held. Later on, in 1944, he persuaded his colleagues to undertake a more organized teaching activity – an annual course of 48 lectures was instituted.
He was chiefly responsible for shaping the policy of the Govt. of Bombay when it took the decision to establish a 30-bed Homoeopathic Hospital for post-graduate training and clinical research. Subsequent events, however, belied his hopes and at the end of nearly a decade of Herculean efforts he found himself a comparatively disillusioned man.
Undaunted by this failure, however, in 1956 he and his colleagues (one of them being his younger son, the late Dr. M. L. Dhawale) revived with renewed zeal the course of lectures of the H. P. G. A., suspended in 1947.
His reputation as a Homoeopathic physician and teacher spread far and wide. In 1955 he was invited by the Ceylon Homoeopathic Society to conduct its first seminar on Homoeopathy. The success of the seminar gave a fillip to the society and they succeeded in establishing a Homoeopathic clinic.
He took ill in February 1959 and was confined to bed thereafter. He bore his disability and sufferings with an uncommon degree of fortitude till he passed away on the 10 th of December 1960.
His literary contributions were not many but the few booklets and Papers that he contributed, as well as his book on Homoeopathy in Marathi (completed posthumously by Dr. M. L. Dhawale), had great intrinsic merit which was acclaimed by the Homoeopathic profession. He was a tower of strength to all those around him and remained unperturbed in times of calamity. As a clinician he had acquired a reputation for unearthing cryptic emotional data. Many, who had something to hide, found it difficult to stand up to his penetrating gaze!
We find in him an early awareness of what he wanted out of his life; a remarkable determination; an inordinate capacity to put in sustained effort, physical as well as mental; a keen logical mind with a philosophical bent; a marvelous ability to surmount the various difficulties coupled with an equal adaptability when the situation demanded; a perfect sense of duty to self, family, society and country which dominated him entirely; a control of the intellect over the emotions not met with ordinarily; an ability to take a detached view of things and to arrive at the right decisions; the rare faculty of seeing through persons, and, finally, the complete absence of love of power and wealth.
We can say in conclusion that his mission in life was the scientific study and propagation of Homoeopathy and the establishment of adequate facilities for its study. All these qualities, natural as well as acquired, fitted him best for this yagna.
