Tag Archives: Arpan K Banerjee

Book review: My Years with the British Red Cross

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover of My Years with The British Red Cross: A Chief Executive Reflects by Sir Nick Young. The Red Cross is known worldwide as a great humanitarian achievement. The charity was founded by Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who was moved by the lack of care available to people who […]

Book review: A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, UK   Cover of A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research: Exploring the Trailblazers of STEM by Dale DeBakcsy Research and writing on women’s contributions to science and medicine are needed and welcome. Books about science and medical advances have often concentrated primarily on men’s achievements and have a […]

The Royal Society of Medicine of London: A brief history

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England   RSM, 1 Wimpole Street, London. Photo by Philafrenzy, 2017, on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. The origins of the Royal Society of Medicine in London can be traced back to 1805. It was in that year that a breakaway group of learned physicians and surgeons formed a new medical society, […]

Book review: The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, UK   Cover of The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, edited by PT Keyser and J Scarborough. Classical antiquity has long been a subject of human fascination. The time period covered in this book ranges from around 1000 BCE to 650 CE. The editors have produced […]

Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield: Inventor of the CT scanner

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England   Godfrey Hounsfield. US National Library of Medicine. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. The name Godfrey Hounsfield is not familiar to most healthcare professionals, yet his invention of the CT (Computerized Tomography) scanner is one of the greatest radiological advances since Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. Nearly all modern hospitals have […]

Book review: Am I Normal?

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England   Cover of Am I Normal?: The 200-Year Search for Normal People (and Why They Don’t Exist) by Sarah Chaney “Am I normal?” is a question that many of us ask at some point in our lives. The existential angst of the twentieth century has resulted in a desire to […]

India’s oldest medical schools

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Medical College of Kolkata. Photo by Dwaipayanc on Wikimedia. Public domain. 15 August 2022 marked the 75th anniversary of Indian independence from British rule. Since independence, the Indian medical diaspora has successfully settled in countries around the world and contributed greatly to their health care systems. […]

Book review: How the Mind Changed: A Human History of Our Evolving Brain

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover of How the Mind Changed: A Human History of Our Evolving Brain by Joseph Jebelli. The human brain has long been a source of wonder and a fascinating subject for study. Philosophers, scientists, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical scholars have spent lifetimes studying the brain and how […]

Book review: Ethel Gordon Fenwick: Nursing Reformer and the First Registered Nurse

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Book cover of Ethel Gordon Fenwick: Nursing Reformer and the First Registered Nurse by Jenny Main. With the exception of Florence Nightingale and more recently of Mary Seacole, relatively few biographies have been written about pioneering nurses. Yet there have been many others who made great contributions to […]

Book review: How the NHS Coped with COVID-19

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover of How the NHS Coped with COVID-19 by Ellen Welch. This work is a timely and important contribution to the literature on the COVID-19 pandemic, which has wreaked havoc worldwide. Following the cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown cause in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, things […]