Reflections

DR Goodeve. Dr Madhusudhan Gupta I recently came across a copy of the Annual Report of the Medical College for the year 1844-45, that is 160 years ago. It was an interesting read and there is much that strikes a chord even today. The report was authored by Dr Mouat who was the Secretary of the college as well as the Professor of Materia Medica and Medical Jurisprudence. The term Materia Medica has now completely been replaced by Pharmacology, but even in our student days there were some senior teachers who still used to use the terminology. At that time there were 9 teachers in the main Instructive section as it was then called. They were Dr Wallich, Dr Jackson, Dr Pearson, Dr O’ Saughnessy ( in whose name the Chemistry medal was still being awarded in our student days), Dr Mouat, Dr Webb , Dr Robertson and of course Madhusudhan Gupta, the first Hindu to dissect human bodies and who is immortalized in a plaque in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre to this day. There were two other India...

I am of that vintage that I can remember times when we had no TV and finally one channel in the idiot box. This was our good old Doordarshan, now totally neglected, except when they forcefully grab the rights for sports events held in India. There were some good programmes, some extremely boring and the highlight of the programming was the news. I would be guilty of injustice if I failed to mention some serials that they produced which have set benchmarks that today’s saas bahu serials never come close to matching, but, the news was the highlight of the Doordarshan day. Everybody watched Doordarshan news those days. You had no alternative, there was no other channel. The newscasters became famous and I am told that they used to receive love letters and fan mail aplenty. The news however was another thing. Doordarshan was called, in those days, not without reason, IndiraDarshan. The reason was of course the single minded devotion to the then Prime Minister and her doings. Not that thing...

One of the reasons that make Siliguri is one of my favourite places is the quick proximity to rivers, jungles and wildlife. It must be the only city in India which is just 10 kilometres away from a wildlife sanctuary. And one that houses big cats as well as elephants. One of my favourite excursions from Siliguri is to Gumla. If you turn off from Champasari on the Highway to Sevoke Bridge, and proceed towards the north, the hills come to meet you. Soon the houses become fewer and very quickly you can see tea gardens in the distance and the forests of the Mahananda sanctuary seem very close indeed. Today, my daughter practices her driving skills. Past the Milon Crossing, there is practically no more traffic, and you dive past a tiny forest village and there the road ends, at the Gulma Station. There is another better known near namesake, Gumla in Jharkhand, another tribal paradise, now infested with Naxalites, but this Gulma is on the Siliguri Alipurduar line, recently converted to bro...

The first use of the term essential hypertension used to describe hypertension without any definite cause is usually attributed to the French physician Huchard, Viennese von Basch or to Englishman Albutt. However it is little known that this condition as well as its natural history was described much earlier by a physician of mixed Indian and Irish origin, Frederick Akbar Mohamad. Son of a man who ran a fencing and boxing academy near Brighton, he was the grandson of the famous Dean Mahomet. Dean (probably a corruption of Deen) was born a a couple of years after Plassey in Patna in a minor nobleman’s family. He became a part of the East India Company army and attached himself to Godfrey Evan Baker who later brought him to England. Dean eloped with an Irish lady Jane Daly and became famous for setting up a shampooing establishment in Brighton . Shampooing in those days meant a sort of spa treatment including massages and diet regulations. He became quite famous in this and later was cre...

One of the enduring tragedies of India is the lack of understanding of the different cultures and religions that make up its mosaic. There is an unfortunate lack of knowledge about the cultures of different states, of different linguistic groups and most of all of differing religious groups. One of the most mysterious and unknown groups for the Hindu community among the different religious groups are the Muslims. Despite the fact that they make up about 20 % of India’s population and about 30% in West Bengal, the knowledge of their customs, thinking and fears are often totally a totally unknown quality to many Hindus. This is a tragicomic situation, unfortunately more tragic than comic. Even for the well meaning and secular person, the other community is a blank and one really does not know what strikes a chord, and what does not, whether at all the community is as monolithic as it seems. One important means of bridging these divides has to be literature and the arts. Speaking for my...