Tag: Arpan K Banerjee
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Book review: Medicine in the Middle Ages
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages refers to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century through the beginning of the Renaissance in the 1500s. These thousand years were characterized by unstable nation-states led by kings and nobility. Tribalism was rife, and…
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Book review: Casanova’s Guide to Medicine
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The eighteenth-century Italian Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) is today best remembered for legendary amorous pursuits that resulted in his name becoming a part of the English language. What has been forgotten, however, is that he was a remarkable and erudite polymath. He graduated as a lawyer from the University of Padua…
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Book review: The Origins of Modern Science
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Science and medicine have long been intertwined: many advances in the field of medicine would not have been possible without prior knowledge of fundamental science. It is not surprising, therefore, that a medical historian would also find the history of science fascinating. In this book, Ofer Gal has described the…
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Francis Henry Williams: the first American chest radiologist
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Williams performing fluoroscopy of chest. From the book by Williams, which is available on The Wellcome Library. Public domain. Francis Henry Williams was born in Massachusetts on July 15, 1852. His father was a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. Williams graduated in chemistry in 1873 from…
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Book review: A Place in History: The Biography of John C. Kendrew
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Remarkable scientific advances in the twentieth century were also crucial for the field of medicine. In the new field of molecular biology, for example, scientists applied the principles of physics and chemistry to elucidate the structure of important proteins and molecules in the human body. John Kendrew was one of…
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Book Review of Intensive Care: A GP, A Community and COVID-19
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Intensive Care: A GP, A Community and COVID-19. Gavin Francis is a family doctor in Scotland who has written several critically-acclaimed books. In his latest work, he chronicles his experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as a family doctor (general practitioner or GP) and the effects of the virus…
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Book review: John Keats’ Medical Notebook
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom February 23, 2021 marked the bicentenary of the death of the great Romantic poet John Keats. Born in 1795, Keats lived a tragically short life, dying at the age of only twenty-five. It is perhaps little known that he first qualified as an apothecary doctor before giving up medicine for…
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Book review: The Origins of AIDS
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom This is a revised and updated edition of a book first published in 2011. This edition is timely, as this year marks the fortieth anniversary of the first descriptions of the disease today known as AIDS. In 1981 Gottlieb and co-workers in the US reported to the Centers for Disease…
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Anatomica: The exquisite and unsettling art of human anatomy
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom The first known anatomy book was written around 300 BC by Diocles, a Greek philosopher and physician who based his work on animal dissections. Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani corpori Fabrica from 1543 was the first major work based on dissections of human cadavers. It dispelled many myths and challenged the…