Bongani Mayosi, a hero remembered

Shortly after joining the internal medicine rotation at Groote Schuur Hospital, Bongani Mayosi admitted a patient with suspected tuberculous pericarditis to one of the medical wards. Little did he anticipate the reaction of the attending consultant the next day on the post-intake ward round when he let her know that he had added high-dose corticosteroids to the patient’s antituberculosis therapy. Stumped by the simple request to provide evidence for his decision and shocked by the absence of definitive answers when he looked it up, he made a mental note to one day be the person who would provide the answers. Twenty years later, Professor Mayosi had not only published the largest clinical trial of interventions for tuberculous pericarditis in the New England Journal of Medicine, but he was widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost authority on the subject