Tag: Arpan K Banerjee
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Ian Donald: Ultrasound pioneer
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Ian Donald was born in Liskeard, Cornwall, UK in 1910 of Scottish ancestry. His father was a general practitioner. He was educated in Scotland at Fettes College and spent a brief period in South Africa from 1925 to 1930, where he studied for a BA degree in Cape Town, before entering…
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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…
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Röntgen’s birthplace
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom November 8th is World Radiology Day and celebrates the discovery of X-rays by Röntgen, who was a fifty-year-old relatively unknown physics professor at the University of Wurzburg in 1895 when he made his important discovery. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born on 11 March 1845 in the house shown in the…
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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,…
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Book review: Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In her new book, Selina Mills, an award-winning journalist who is legally blind, takes us on a journey through the cultural history of visual impairment and blindness. It is both informative and empowering, weaving together research and the author’s personal experience. Throughout time, loss of sight has been associated with…
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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…
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Book review: Fighting for Life: The Twelve Battles That Made Our NHS, and the Struggle for Its Future
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) was born on July 5, 1948, and on the seventy-fifth anniversary of its existence, British journalist and broadcaster Isabel Hardman has produced a book using military analogies to focus on the many political battles and political contests that have shaped its current form. The…
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Book review: Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Simon Schama, the eminent historian and broadcaster, has turned his attention to medical history. His new book, gestated and born during the COVID pandemic, is a chronicle of three pandemic diseases that have afflicted humans for centuries: smallpox, cholera, and plague. He opens the book with a quote from Pliny…
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Book review: The Story of the Brain in 10 1/2 Cells
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom 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, weaving together neuroscience with stories of scientific pioneers who made major contributions to elucidating how the…
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Book review: Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, UK I do not use superlatives lightly, but this is an extraordinary book. It is ambitious in scope and seeks to describe the progress of humanity from earliest times with an emphasis on the role of infectious diseases in our cultural, economic, political, and scientific development. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as…