Tag Archives: X-rays

Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield: Inventor of the CT scanner

September 27, 2022

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 […]

Movie review: Bisturi: La Mafia Bianca

September 26, 2022

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Surgeons operating aboard the USS Harry S. Truman. US Navy photo via Wikimedia. Public domain. “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 […]

Book review: The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong

June 30, 2022

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Cover of The Imaginary Patient: How Diagnosis Gets Us Wrong. 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 […]

“Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease”

May 12, 2022

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Hair loss in child with tinea capitis infection. CDC, 1970. Public domain. 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, […]

R. Austin Freeman and the Victorian forensic thriller

December 9, 2021

Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece   Richard Austin Freeman, c. 1935. W.L. Briant. Via Encyclopædia Britannica. 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 […]

On the way to school

October 22, 2021

Mary Jumbelic Syracuse, New York, United States   Illustration by Joshua Jumbles. Published with permission. 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 […]

Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis

September 9, 2021

Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Poster for Chaplin film City Lights. 1931. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. 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 […]

Francis Henry Williams: the first American chest radiologist

April 27, 2021

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 […]

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin OM, FRS (1910-1994)

November 4, 2020

JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1: Dorothy Hodgkin. by Godfrey Argent. National Portrait Gallery, London. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. 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 […]

Sarah’s lesson

October 8, 2020

Henri Colt Laguna Beach, California, United States   Claude Monet. St. Germain l’Auxerrois à Paris. 1867 Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 79 × 98, W.84. Source Sarah put her hand on my forearm and dug a fingernail into my white coat. “Doc, I druther you not call my husband in just yet,” she said. “Doc?” I smiled. “You […]