Tag Archives: Cambridge University

Book review: Albemarle Street: Portraits, personalities and presentations at the Royal Institution

November 4, 2021

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover of Albemarle Street: Portraits, personalities and presentations at the Royal Institution by John Meurig Thomas. In this fascinating book, the late Professor Meurig Thomas, a distinguished chemist, former Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and an accomplished popularizer of science, tells the story of one of Britain’s greatest […]

Mental hospital memories of another era

September 30, 2021

Robert Craig Brisbane, Queensland, Australia   The former St. Audry’s Hospital. Photo by Adrian S Pye. CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1964, having obtained a place to study medicine at Cambridge University, I was given the opportunity as a medical student to work as an assistant nurse for three months in a large residential mental hospital […]

Medical and other memories of the Cold War and its Iron Curtain

January 28, 2021

Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe  Dundee, Scotland, UK   Iron Curtain as described by Churchill 1946. Edited from original. Original by BigSteve via Wikimedia. (CC BY 1.0) In 1946, Winston Churchill named the political barrier appearing between the Soviet bloc and the West the “Iron Curtain.” It lasted until 1991. I met or crossed it several times. The […]

The first description of DNA: a six million dollar letter from Francis to Michael Crick

August 4, 2020

Marshall A. Lichtman  Rochester, New York, United States   Figure 1. The boyish appearing James Watson (left) and the Francis Crick with their three-dimensional model of DNA in their Cavendish Laboratory office at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Circa 1953. Photo credit: A. Barrington Brown/Science Photo Library. Via the Rockefeller University Digital Commons. In the April […]

Two tales of talipes equinovarus

May 21, 2019

Christopher Walker Bielsko-Biala, Poland   Operations for club-foot. Wellcome Collection. Public domain. Congenital talipes equinovarus, better known as clubfoot, is a poorly understood but surprisingly common medical condition. According to Ansar et al, it affects about one in one thousand newborns, though this figure varies by country.1 There is a roughly fifty-fifty split between those […]

Stephen Hales: belief and blood pressure

October 9, 2018

Joseph deBettencourt Chicago, Illinois, United States “It would but ill become us in this our State of Uncertainty, to treat the Errors and Mistakes of others with Scorn and Contempt, when we ourselves see Things but as through a Glass darkly, and are very far from any Pretensions to Infallibility” — Stephen Hales, Haemastatics   […]