Tag: X-rays
-
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and X-rays
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England 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 house where he was born is now looked after…
-
Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield: Inventor of the CT scanner
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England 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 a CT scanner, which enables doctors to make a more accurate diagnosis, especially…
-
Movie review: Bisturi: La Mafia Bianca
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Medicine is power. It makes us giants.”—Dr. Daniele Valotti in Bisturi: La Mafia Bianca Bisturi: La Mafia Bianca (1973) is an understated, well-acted, and critical “doctor movie.” Unlike The Hospital, it is not a black comedy of errors, and unlike Where Does It Hurt? it is not a broad, obvious satire. It…
-
Book review: The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom Making the right diagnosis is central to the medical encounter. A doctor always started off by taking a history, examining the patient, and sometimes performing additional tests. But when a creditable diagnosis could not be made, the medical profession often invented conditions that later were shown not to exist. Such…
-
“Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease”
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden Overconfidence is an undesirable quality. It does not enhance a physician’s approach to learning, nor to changing when change is needed. How a doctor diagnoses or treats a condition today may cause future generations of physicians to wonder, “What were they thinking? Did they not think about potential long-term effects?” Such future…
-
R. Austin Freeman and the Victorian forensic thriller
Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Many people today are acquainted with well-known books and television series of forensic crime fiction. The modern detective fiction writer is expected to provide detailed descriptions of autopsies, current technology, pharmacology, and toxicology. Yet, even in this relatively new version of the old genre of police fiction, there is nothing new under…
-
On the way to school
Mary JumbelicSyracuse, New York, United States A thin line of blood oozed from a shallow cut in the skin, like the first stroke of an artist’s brush on a blank canvas. The second and third incisions intersected the first to form a large Y-shape. Sanguinous fluid beaded up along their lengths. As the scalpel penetrated…
-
Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom For doctors and lovers of cinema, 1895 was an important year. On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a fifty-year-old professor of physics, discovered X-rays in his laboratory in Wurzburg, Germany. On March 22 1895, the Lumiere brothers presented the first film on a screen to an audience of 200 in…
-
Francis Henry Williams: the first American chest radiologist
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom 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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in medicine from Harvard in 1877.1 He followed this with two years of training in…
-
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin OM, FRS (1910-1994)
JMS PearceHull, England Dorothy Hodgkin (Fig 1), though not by religion, had close Quaker affinities through her marriage and through her spirited pacifism. She possessed a unique mixture of scientific skills that allowed her to extend the use of X-rays to reveal the structures of compounds, a technical venture far more complex than anything attempted…