Tag: Arpan Banerjee
-
Book review: Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The subjects of ageing, death, and immortality have long preoccupied human thoughts and culture. The ancient Egyptians practiced mummification out of a belief in an afterlife. Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation with the immortal soul living on in another body. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam also have rites and rituals that…
-
Book review: Disease and Healing in the Indus Civilisation
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The Indus (Harappan) civilisation was one of the three contemporaneous ancient civilisations, the others being the Egyptian and Mesopotamian. First excavated by the British in the 1920s, it existed from 3300–1300 BC, extending from the south in Gujarat to northwest India and Pakistan across the Indus and the now often dried…
-
Kadambini Bose Ganguly—India’s first female physician
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The name Kadambini Ganguly is not as well remembered today as those of other female pioneering physicians around the world. In her time, Ganguly was a remarkable trailblazer and the first Indian female doctor to practice Western medicine in India. She was also one of the first women to be admitted…
-
Thomas Guy and his statue
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Thomas Guy was probably the greatest charitable benefactor in eighteenth-century Britain. At his death, he had amassed a fortune of over two hundred thousand pounds (worth around 500 million pounds in today’s money). His largesse was directed primarily at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark, London. As a governor of St Thomas’s Hospital,…
-
Rene Favaloro—Father of cardiac bypass surgery
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Over the last century, there have been many important contributions to medicine made by Argentinians. Of these Rene Geronimo Favaloro’s must surely be of the greatest, and his work on cardiac bypass surgery has saved countless of lives. Born of Sicilian ancestry on July 12, 1923, in La Plata, Argentina, Favaloro…
-
John Keats statue
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England John Keats, born in London in 1795, is one of the finest Romantic poets of the English language. He died at the age of twenty-five in Rome, where he had gone to recover from tuberculosis. The house where he spent the last years of his life, at the base of the…
-
Book review: Meeting the Challenge: Top Women in Science
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Women have long faced difficulties in acceptance to scientific fields. Science today remains male-dominated, but there are more examples of brilliant female scientists who have broken through the so-called glass ceiling. In her preface to Meeting the Challenge, Magdolna Hargittai illustrates this point with the 2020 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners,…
-
Book review: Sir Thomas Browne: The Opium of Time
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK Sir William Osler was a great admirer of Sir Thomas Browne’s 1643 Religio Medici, one of his favorite books and on his recommended reading list for medical men. Browne influenced many writers, such as Samuel Johnson, WG Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, and EM Forster. In this slim volume, Gavin…
-
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and X-rays
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. LIFE Photo Archive. Via Wikimedia. The name Röntgen will be familiar to most for his discovery of X-rays on November 8, 1895. This date is now celebrated as the International Day of Radiology. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in Lennep, Germany on March 27, 1845. The…
-
Book review: The Story of the Brain in 10 1/2 Cells
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Cover of The Story of the Brain in 10 1/2 Cells by Richard Wingate The brain is arguably the most complex organ in the human body, containing more than 100 billion neurons. In this new book, neuroscientist Richard Wingate sets out to describe different types of brain cells,…